Saga of the Ortegids: Appendix N

If you haven't read the
Nintendo Power handbook,
do yourself a favor.

I know the Year of the Barbarian has run on longer than a year at this point, but I haven't had much time with which to sit down and write this post. In any case, I've put together an Appendix N for The Saga of the Ortegids, compiling a list of works that carry the same sort of feel I'm shooting for in my personal vision of the setting, or otherwise are useful as influences. See also this post on the "dials" of the setting - certain influences can be played up or down to convey different feels.

The Sacred Texts

These are to be considered in broad strokes canon to Saga.

• Dragon Warrior (1989), Dragon Warrior II (1990), and Dragon Warrior III (1992) (NES)
• Specifically the NES versions, including art and literature included in game manuals.
• The promotional art of Katsuya Terada (1963-) and Kensuke Suzuki (1964-2018)
• This art is the reason this project exists. If Dragon Quest canon is "Akira Toriyama's Dragon Quest," then The Saga of the Ortegids is "Katsuya Terada's Dragon Warrior."

Artists

• John Buscema (1927-2002)
• Clyde Caldwell (1948-)
• Larry Elmore (1948-)
• Ron Embleton (1930-1988)
• Frank Frazetta (1928-2010)
• Greg (1939-2024) and Tim Hildebrandt (1939-2006)
• John Howe (1957-)
• Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874 - 1925)
• Moebius (1938-2012)
• Earl Norem (1923-2015)
• Boris Vallejo (1941-)

Comics

• 300 (1998)
• Arak: Son of Thunder (1981-1985)
• Beowulf: Dragon Slayer (1975-1976)
• Claw the Unconquered  (1975-1978)
• Marvel's Conan the Barbarian (1970-1993)
• Dragon Quest: The Mark of Erdrick (1991-1997)
• Not canon to Saga, in large part because it wasn't translated until last year, but a good example of how you can expand on the lore of the Erdrick Trilogy while taking it in a grittier direction.
• Red Sonja (1977-1983)
• The Savage Sword of Conan (1974-1995)
• Vinland Saga (2005-2025)

Film and Television

• The 13th Warrior (1999)
• The Beastmaster (1982)
• Captain N: The Game Master (1989-1991) - S1E7 "Three Men and a Dragon" and S2E10 "The Trojan Dragon"
• Thankfully not canon to Saga, but it does at least give you a sense of how Western audiences perceived Dragon Quest when it first came out.
• Cleopatra (1963)
• Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984)
• Deathstalker series (1983-1991)
• Dragonheart (1996)
• Excalibur (1981)
• Fire and Ice (1983)
• Gladiator (2000)
• Hawk the Slayer (1980)
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-1999) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001)
• House of David (2025)
• Ladyhawke (1985)
• Legend (1985)
• The Legend of Zelda (1989)
• Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings (1978)
• The Northman (2022)
• The Odyssey (1997)
• Primal (2019-)
• Red Sonja (1985)
• Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
• Samurai Jack (2001-2004; 2017)
• The Scorpion King (2002)
• The Ten Commandments (1956)
• The Thief of Baghdad (1940)
• Vikings (2013-2021)
• Almost anything by Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013)
• Mostly his sword-and-sandal output, but even something like One Million Years BC could be taking place in the Worldforest.

Literature

• Beowulf
• Lin Carter (1930-1988); various
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Ferdowsi; The Shahnameh
• Gustave Flaubert; Salammbo (1862)
• Homer; The Illiad and The Odyssey
• Robert E. Howard (1906-1936); various
• Elias Lonrott; The Kalevala (1835)
• Fritz Leiber (1910-1992); various
• The Old Testament
• Orlando Furioso
• The Saga of the Volsungs
• Yes, that's where the name came from.
• JRR Tolkien; The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)
• Valmiki; The Ramayana
• Virgil; The Aeneid
• Vyasa; The Mahabharata
• Wu Cheng'en; Journey to the West (1592)

Video Games

All entries include North American promotional art and manual materials, if applicable.

• Assassin's Creed series (2007-)
• Dragon Warrior I & II (2000) and Dragon Warrior III (2001; Game Boy Color)
• This is after the series started embracing its ties to anime in the international market, but they are in my opinion the best versions of the games, and some content added for these releases found their way into Saga.
• Dragon Warrior IV (1992; NES)
• Faxanadu (1989; NES)
• Final Fantasy (1990; NES)
• The Legend of Zelda (1987) and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988) (NES)

Taloon the Arms Dealer

With the Year of the Barbarian drawing to a close, I can't deny that the biggest project it's seen has been The Saga of the Ortegids - my attempt to construct a tabletop-friendly setting based on the original Dragon Quest trilogy as depicted through the grittier, sword-and-sorcery-flavored art of Katsuya Terada, as used in early Western box covers and manual art, instead of the now-iconic work of Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama. My original intent was to have a dungeon to show for my work by now, capping off the year by revisiting my roots and adapting one of the games' dungeons to the tabletop. My work schedule has kept me from attending to that as much as I'd like to, so I won't have any of that ready to share until the beginning of next year. However, in the meantime, I did have an idle thought that refused to leave my head, and I'm making that your problem.

In my original post outlining the project, I specified that Saga would only strictly adapt the first three games in the series, which all take place in the same universe; continuity gets a lot more loose after that. That being said, Dragon Quest IV did see a Western release at the tail end of the NES's lifespan, and with similar marketing. Eagle-eyed fans will already know that a couple of references to DQ4 and beyond have slipped into Saga, though not always in their original context. Therefore, I think certain elements are still on the table, and it's one of those I'd like to discuss today.

I would consider Dragon Quest IV to be the first "traditional JRPG" in the way we understand it today. Yes, there were RPGs made in Japan before it, including the first three Dragon Quest games, but those games are almost indistinguishable from western RPGs of the era, with PCs frequently being customizable blank slates and the gameplay focusing more on player-driven open-world exploration. DQ4, meanwhile, emphasized the story first and foremost, with a more linear plot and a predefined set of characters whose struggles were told through scripted cutscenes and personal arcs. Hell, the antagonist is a brooding silver-haired twink in a black coat who wants to destroy the world because he was wronged by society, and this was almost a decade before Sephiroth made it cool.

An entire genre exists
because of this man.

It's interesting, then, that such an influential game would also introduce the character of Torneko (or Taloon if you're a Westerner, or Torneko Taloon if you're a Westerner who got into this after the 90s). Torneko is about as far from a typical playable JRPG character as you could imagine. In a cast that consists mainly of sexy teenagers with emotional baggage, Torneko is a jolly, rotund, middle-aged dad who just wants to raise money to support his family. In spite of this, or more likely because of it, he's probably the single most iconic and beloved character in the entire series. He got his entire spinoff series, which kick-started Japan's own take on the roguelike genre with the mystery dungeon, and he continues to make cameo appearances in later games to this day. If Dragon Quest has a mascot that isn't the Slime, it's Torneko.

With that context out of the way, I'd like to pivot to the much-argued dichotomy of transliteration versus localization. Stay with me, I promise we're going somewhere with this.

In adapting media produced in one language to another language, the eternal debate is this: do you translate the original material directly word-for-word to preserve the original intent, accepting that certain cultural references might not land the same way in a new context, or do you rewrite the source material to be more understandable to a new audience? There's been plenty of ink spilled on the topic of which approach is better, and it's not a subject I intend to get into in this post. I think there's a right and a wrong way to do both.

Pertinently, I'm of the opinion that the modern approach to translating the Dragon Quest games is exactly how you should not do localization - the series' current localization team takes heavy liberties with how they present dialogue and characterization, often painting things in a much more light-hearted and comedic light than what was intended in the original Japanese, to the point where the head translator had to apologize in an interview for writing horse puns into a scene where a child has his father brutally murdered in front of him. Some people like this approach, and that's fine, but it is absolutely not what the series is in Japanese, and I wrote Saga in part as a rebuttal to this very phenomenon.

However, I'd be lying if I said that the Dragon Quest series hadn't suffered from transliteration at times as well. One of my favorite examples of this is how the English NES manual of Dragon Warrior IV describes Taloon as an arms dealer.

See, if you've experienced enough Japanese fantasy media, you can figure out exactly how this happened. In Japanese RPGs, the stores where you would purchase weapons are often referred to as buki-ya, literally "weapon shop." A localization would likely render this as "blacksmith" - while that's a different word in Japanese, anyone playing an RPG would recognize a blacksmith's shop as the obvious place to upgrade your equipment (interestingly, Taloon doesn't actually appear to make the weapons he sells; rather, his operation seems to consist of going dungeon delving to loot weapons and then selling them to other adventurers). However, the NES manual directly translated buki-ya into English, and Taloon was described as an "arms merchant" - something that has a very different connotation in the English-speaking world.

Normally, this is the part where we'd all point and laugh at how ridiculous that makes this character sound. But this is an RPG blog run by a deranged autist who gets inspiration from the weirdest places. And I kind of love it.

In popular media, the stock character of the arms dealer is usually a villainous figure tied to organized crime. Think of Ulysses Klaue from Black Panther, or if you're older, Destro from GI Joe. They're usually depicted as unscrupulous cold-hearted capitalists profiteering off of senseless bloodshed, willing to prop up civil wars and tinpoint dictatorships simply to line their own pockets. With this in mind, an arms dealer turning out to be a wholesome family man is actually a very interesting subversion of expectations.

If The Saga of the Ortegids is intended to be an exploration of the implied setting of, specifically, the Western presentation of Dragon Warrior lore, resisting the urge to add context from the original Japanese, perhaps Taloon really is an arms dealer. Maybe he's not merely supplying adventurers, but covertly running weapons to different sides of an ongoing conflict to make some extra coin. It's quite thought-provoking to contemplate how someone like Taloon could have ended up in this situation. Are times so tough that he's forced to extend his trade to the black market to make ends meet, knowing that he can't fail his beloved wife and son? Is he perhaps attempting to gain favor with multiple warring factions in the hopes that they can be swayed to leave him and his family out of the conflict?

Yes, the Taloon we see in Dragon Warrior IV is very clearly not doing this, but perhaps there's an alternate universe counterpart of him that exists in the universe of The Saga of the Ortegids who is. It wouldn't be the first time a version of him showed up outside of his original context  (not even on this blog), and because the source material for Saga doesn't directly include DQ4, I feel comfortable taking more leeway on how I present him compared to how I present characters from the original trilogy. It'd make for a fun nod for any players who were familiar with the original games, as well as an opportunity to turn their expectations on their head with the true extent of his operations.

More practically, an unwilling arms dealer would also make for an interesting NPC to shake up faction dynamics. If he's supplying an ongoing conflict, does he take sides, or does he try to play both sides against each other for his own ends? The PCs could easily become involved in his schemes, perhaps running weapons for him, or bailing him out of trouble if his smuggling operations attract the wrong attention. Because Taloon's family-oriented motives are sympathetic ones, more morally-inclined PCs might be more willing to back him up than they would a stereotypical arms dealer motivated only by cold hard cash, which could open fun opportunities for faction play to parties that might not ordinarily want to get involved with the criminal underbelly of the setting. At the same time, it presents a moral dilemma - are they willing to perpetuate a bloody conflict if it means a sweet old man gets to come home to his family another night?

So, yes, this is all a very deliberate misinterpretation of a bad translation. But it's a fun one, dammit - and I can't help but feel like dropping this incarnation of Taloon into a campaign set during the Kinslayer Wars, or another conflict in a different setting, would shake things up well.

Elements of Japanese Fantasy

I've discussed the distinct phenomenon of British fantasy gaming in the 70s and 80s - a movement that had its own tropes and conventions quite different from that across the Atlantic. In fact, that was my first brush with writing on this sort of thing when I first submitted it as a long post on the OSR subreddit that garnered plenty of discussion and made me realize I'd do well with this whole blogging thing. But there's also something to be said about the distinct flavor of the fantasy subgenre across the Pacific as well. Japanese fantasy, as seen in anime and JRPG video games but also in that country's own canon of fantasy literature (there's quite a bit there, even if most of it has never been translated into English) has its own idiosyncracies, and while we're on the subject, I figured that would be a fun tangent to explore.

What's interesting about the fantasy genre in Japan is how much of it was popularized through the medium of gaming. While The Lord of the Rings was translated in Japan and was quite popular and influential there in its own right, what really made Western fantasy take off was when Dungeons & Dragons was imported, receiving a complete facelift with new illustrations from local artists. Early works in the Japanese fantasy scene, like Record of Lodoss War, were direct novelizations of the writers' D&D campaigns. This in turn created a demand for video RPGs, which resulted in Ultima and Wizardry becoming such big hits that they spurred the creation of homegrown takes on the genre like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, and those in turn fed back into the popular Japanese consciousness to the point where RPG-like mechanics are commonly employed in fantasy storytelling even if the story isn't based on an existing RPG - what's called the literary RPG, or LitRPG genre. This can range from game mechanics being reinterpreted as in-universe phenomena (like the concept of "monsters," as I'll discuss below) to characters outright talking about leveling up in-universe with a straight face.

This isn't really something I enjoy. As I've discussed elsewhere on this blog, I prefer my game mechanics to facilitate the worldbuilding, not the other way around. Still, it's an interesting observation when it comes to the history of fantasy gaming, and it's worth noting because it makes up a pretty big part of the genre in the Japanese consciousness.

On that note, I should clarify that, despite being based on Dragon Quest, The Saga of the Ortegids is quite pointedly not a "Japanese fantasy" setting. It's based on the older entries in the series before the tropes of Japanese fantasy fully crystalized into what they are today, and specifically on the artwork used to promote the games in Western markets back in the NES era, which downplayed the series' ties to anime in favor of emphasizing its Western fantasy roots. A big part of that exercise was trying to put what we see in the games through the lens of old-school Western fantasy, and seeing what came out on the other side. However, in researching Dragon Quest and its inspirations and derivative works, it's impossible not to come across some common threads that are worth cataloguing. I'm sure it would be of use to some DMs out there.

Slayers

Not all Japanese fantasy stories and settings tick all these boxes. The world of Japanese fantasy runs the full gamut from the silly (Konosuba) to the grimdark (Berserk), and from settings that are almost indistinguishable from a typical D&D campaign (Dungeon Meshi) to settings that have evolved a constellation of unique tropes and traditions of their own (later Final Fantasy titles). However, there's definitely a few select qualities that are particular to Japanese fantasy traditions I want to enumerate.

• To get the more famous superficial differences out of the way: elves tend to have ears that point to the side rather than straight up. Due to the persistent influence of the early D&D editions, kobolds are more likely to be dog-like rather than reptilian, and orcs are more likely to be pig-faced (often, they go as far to be straight-up anthropomorphic pig people, complete with pink skin and portly physiques). Slimes and oozes are much more common, and almost always are low-level cannon fodder, thanks to Wizardry by way of Dragon Quest.

• 

  Dungeon Meshi

  A major difference I've noted is in the nature of monsters. In Western fantasy RPGs, "monsters" are usually a game mechanic - the term encompasses a number of different, largely unrelated beings, from animals to humanoids to sometimes even archetypes of humans. A "monster" is, effectively, anything with a statblock. In Japanese fantasy, however, it's quite common for "monsters" to be a category of being that exists in-universe and are recognized as such. A goblin, a slime, and a dragon are all, metaphysically, the same class of entity, and are fundamentally different than a human or a horse. It's rare for the cultures and societies of humanoid monsters like orcs and goblins to be explored, and they're usually treated more like exceptionally smart animals. For some reason, it's quite common for monsters to uniformly be edible, and for there to be thriving culinary traditions utilizing their meat.
• If monsters are treated as a monolith, then they will usually be portrayed as servants of a "Demon King," "Dark Lord," "Archfiend," or similar entity. I discuss that some here, but to recap: this is a stock character that serves as an embodiment of evil, but one that exists on the physical plane, with their own territory and minions. They behave as something of a cross between Tolkien's Sauron and a video game final boss, and were inspired by both. Monsters tend to be uniformly or predominately aligned with this figure; in some cases, they're the source of all evil in the world.

  

  Final Fantasy

• Often, the "Demon King" is contrasted with a "Hero." If the Demon King is an archetype that grew from the final bosses of video games, the Hero represents the player character. They are usually chosen by a divine power and may be imbued with special abilities, and tasked with slaying the Demon King. I've seen multiple settings where the Demon King and Hero were both positions in a cyclical cosmic struggle - every time the Demon King is slain by a Hero, there is a period of peace until a new Demon King arises, at which point a new Hero is chosen to oppose them. The Hero is usually the protagonist of the story, but it's a very popular twist to reveal that the prophecized Hero is in fact someone else - so popular that, despite being in many ways the template of this archetype, Dragon Quest has done it twice.
• Religion and deities do not often play an important part in the setting, compared to Western fantasy. There will often be a religion, and clerics will often have D&D-like healing magic, but it's rare for that religion to be defined in a worldbuilding sense. Usually, the aesthetics and structure of this religion will be heavily based on Catholicism, and it will either be monotheistic or worship a vaguely-defined pantheon of gods, but the gods will rarely be named or have their portfolios described. If the religion is important in the setting, it will almost invariably be villainous in nature - how this manifests can be anywhere from "run by corrupt clergy only concerned with worldly power" to "front for demon worship."

Tales of Symphonia

• Japanese fantasy settings tend to be humanocentric, even more so than their Western counterparts. Human polities and settlements will almost always be uniformly human. If other races exist, they will have entirely separate societies. Often times, if there are traditional fantasy races like elves and dwarves, they will largely be present as NPCs and their societies will not receive that much attention; nonhumans are more likely to be major characters if they belong to a race invented for the setting.
• Compared to Western fantasy settings, human civilizations are less likely to be based on a specific real-world culture, and are usually a generically late medieval melange. There are often multiple kingdoms, but they tend to be outwardly similar if not identical in culture. If there are exceptions, there will almost always be a culture based on feudal Japan (for obvious reasons). Ancient Egypt is another popular choice.

• 

  Konosuba

  Anachronistic technology tends to be more common than in Western fantasy settings, particularly in more animesque settings that run on the rule of cool (like Final Fantasy). This tends to manifest as steampunk technology, magically-powered technology, or both. Firearms are more likely to be present in Japanese fantasy settings than Western ones. Even in more grounded settings, there are usually anachronisms that can be attributed to the skewed perception of historical Europe as an exotic foreign culture from the perspective of Japanese writers - for instance, nobles will usually live in Baroque palaces, not medieval castles, even if the domains they govern are feudal.
• Kings and emperors are either ineffectual buffoons, corrupt tyrants, or ineffectual buffoons controlled by their corrupt tyrannical advisors. Queens are usually absent or inconsequential. Princes are spoiled snobs. Princesses are clever, kind, and often secretly yearn for lives of adventure. If lesser nobles like dukes, counts, barons, or lords show up, they are usually evil. The royal family of a kingdom will often have the name of their kingdom as a surname (seriously, once you start noticing this, you see it everywhere.)
• Magic tends to be rigidly codified, even more so than in Western fantasy settings. Owing to influence from TRPGs, video games, and martial arts anime, spells will usually have distinct names, usually of the sort spoken aloud in a dramatic fashion while casting them. Their properties are well-defined and predictable, and they may have distinct "levels" of power or difficulty to master that are known in-universe.

These are just some observations I've made through consuming this sort of media. There are almost certainly more - and if I've missed anything, feel free to leave a comment below. If you're making a fantasy setting that's inspired by anime or JRPGs, using tropes like these will help it feel more authentic, while at the same time imbuing a flavor quite distinct from Western fantasy.

Zipangu

The various regions and kingdoms of Dragon Quest III's overworld take varying degrees of inspiration from their real-world counterparts. Lancel, for instance, might look like Australia on the map, but has absolutely no allusions to Australian history or culture. On the flip side, the Kingdom of Zipangu is particularly blatant about wearing its inspiration on its sleeve.

Zipangu is quite clearly based on Japan - if you didn't guess that from the name, or the fact that it's located on a chain of islands off the coast of the Asian-equivalent land mass, it's one of the few areas that has its own graphical assets not found anywhere else in the game, complete with a prominent torii gate in the center of the capital. Furthermore, it's an isolationist power with little contact with the outside world, as Japan famously was during the medieval era. There are no inns in town, and a foreign priest mentions trying to introduce his faith to the populace, indicating that they practice a different religion from that of the rest of Erdland. We don't get many specifics about this, but the kingdom does practice one particular ritual that the quest here centers around.

Zipangu's queen, Himiko, has ordered that one the kingdom's women be periodically sacrificed to appease a dragon known as the Orochi that dwells nearby. The twist, of course, is that Himiko is the Orochi in human form, using her status as queen to manipulate the people into following her orders, and the threat of devastation from the Orochi to bring them into line.

If you're as into history and mythology as I am, you've probably caught a couple of references immediately. Himiko was, of course, an early queen of what is now Japan, and the Orochi is an eight-headed dragon that plays into one of Japan's most celebrated myths - complete with demanding tribute in the form of maidens to devour. DQ3 is far from the only game to reference either of these figures. But they do raise some interesting worldbuilding questions for chronic overanalyzers like me.

Art by Maukamauka

Most people, upon seeing a region in a fantasy setting taking cues from Japanese history, will immediately envision something like Legend of the Five Rings - the first thing that comes to mind is the feudal era of Japan's Warring States period. I can admit that there are a number of factors that make this era well-suited for gaming. I've spoken on the storytelling potential of feudal politics before, and the number of competing factions of the era would create plenty of opportunities for players to get involved with one or the other, making allegiances and enemies, and potentially carving out their own domains. That's all fair and good, and if you like it, I can't fault you.

But I am going to be honest. I am utterly sick of samurai.

When was the last time you saw an Asian-inspired fantasy setting that wasn't specifically based on Japan? Well, I guess Yoon-Suin kicked off a trend of Southeast Asian fantasy settings, but aside from that. If you're lucky, you might get something based on China, but even then it tends to have samurai, ninjas, and yokai in it anyway. If Korean, or Mongolian, or Tibetan, or Siberian, or Indian, or Persian, or Turkic, or what have you history is more your thing, well, you're just out of luck. The fact is, Asia is a tremendously vast continent, with hundreds of fascinating cultures, some of which have rich histories going back literal millennia, and that stuff is woefully unexplored when it comes to inspiration. Sure, I like Kurosawa movies as much as anyone, but when every setting plays on the same old tropes, it starts to get tiresome.

Even looking at Japan itself, the country has plenty of interesting history outside of the Sengoku era. And that's particularly notable here, because the Orochi myth was first recorded in the eighth century, while Himiko reigned during the third century AD - both long before the time of samurai. Centering Zipangu somewhere in these eras would create a setting with a very different look and feel from what most people are used to.

If you lean on the earlier side of things, you could have something like the Yayoi Period, with shaman-kings asserting divine right, nobles decorating themselves with intricate tattoos, and the use of bronze bells and mirrors in rituals. If you expand the time frame a little further, you could even get Kofun-era burial mounds, which give you a ready excuse to have dungeons to loot - and angry spirits to invoke curses on you for disturbing their tombs. You don't even have to leave behind powerful regional rulers with a weak central government, as much of society was structured around localized clans at this time, just without a corresponding tradition of an honor-bound warrior caste.

Alternatively, you could look at what Japan looked like just before the feudal era was in full swing, with the Heian Period. Here, the country enjoyed more peace and stability than it would for centuries afterward, with the arts and culture flourishing, but you still had nobles accruing more and more power for themselves in the background, growing increasingly dissatisfied with the hands-off approach of a government with little interest in stopping the ever-present threat of banditry. There might not be any outright civil wars just yet, but it's still an environment conducive to independent adventurers unfettered by the light grasp of the law. Plus, with the authorities having little control over the economy, much commerce was done through barter and gifts - which could provide ways to get magic items into PCs' hands as a reward for completing quests.

Despite all me saying this, if you did want to put samurai and shoguns into Zipangu, I do think there's a place for that. Erdland is, after all, very much a History's Greatest Hits setting that favors the rule of cool over any internal consistency when it comes to historical accuracy. If you wanted to have a setting with giant burial mounds, shaman-kings, roving bandits, and ninjas all at the same time, it would not at all be out of place with some of the other things I've discussed for The Saga of the Ortegids.

There's also the fact that we don't really find out what happens to Zipangu after the events of DQ3, once the Orochi is vanquished. Sure, the dragon demanding tribute from the innocent people is gone...but when you consider that dragon was also a queen with enough power to hold the people in her sway, there's likely a power vacuum left in her place. And surely with any power vacuum comes opportunities for ambitious nobles with big enough armies to try and assert control - and without a doubt there are more of them than the islands have room for...

In Defense of Gor, Part 3: Gaming on Gor

Now that we've gotten the disclaimers out of the way and taken a look at the history of Gorean influences on the gaming scene, we can finally get to the stuff I've been wanting to talk about. We now know that many individuals in the early TRPG community read the Gor novels and used elements of the series to influence gaming materials. But is there any particular reason why Gor was used as an influence by so many gamers, as opposed to any other novel? I, personally, think there's something to that. Looking deeper into the setting, we can see that the way it's set up makes it very easy to facilitate RPG campaigns, especially those in the old-school milieu.

In fact, after reviewing these things, I am convinced that, had he been born ten years later, John Norman would likely have been an early contributor to the RPG industry. To date, the only official Gor RPG is Postmortem Studios's Tales of Gor, originally published in 2017. We have no reason to believe that Norman ever played an RPG, or even knows what one is. But he was an advocate of roleplaying as a activity in Imaginative Sex, citing it as a natural behavior that one should not be afraid or ashamed of engaging in, and as a safe outlet for desires that would be unethical or impossible in real life. Yes, he's talking about a different kind of roleplaying game here, but it isn't hard to see how he might be intrigued by tabletop gaming if he had been in the circles where it first arose. For that matter, the setting he created shares many traits in common with some of gaming's most enduring settings, as well as the ideals elaborated by those writing on the subject.

Before we begin, though, I would like to include an addendum to my last post. White Dwarf, back when it was a general gaming magazine and not solely a Games Workshop-related publication, used to run a column called Fiend Factory, listing new monsters for D&D, often submitted by readers. Many of those entries would later be collected in the Fiend Folio, making that book and its monsters a part of the British old-school gaming tradition. Issue 49 features a Fiend Factory article themed around insects, and includes stats for the golden beetle, a creature prominently featured in 1968's Priest-Kings of Gor. The entry, submitted by Steven Quayle, specifically lists the novel as its source material. Once again, we have evidence that many gamers of the era read Gor novels and wished to bring them to the table.

Anyway, back to our subject of the day: what makes Gor so gameable?

1. Deep, Readily Accessible Lore

Though the novels are infamously dry and many find the prose unexciting, it cannot be denied that a lot of thought went into the creation of Gor as a setting. Over the course of 38 books, Norman extensively details multiple cultures, locations, and characters, exploring what this world looks like, who lives there, and how these people think, act, and behave. We know how Goreans fight in wars, what their etiquette is like, how their castes are structured, what they eat, and so on. This is the same sort of information that might be found in an RPG setting guide - and because of it, it would be quite easy to run a campaign that feels like it authentically takes place in the same world as the original stories.

In fact, many books in the series focus on a journey to a particular region of Gor; for instance, Tribesmen of Gor takes place in the Tahari Desert, and Explorers of Gor focuses on the equatorial jungles of Schendi. They describe the inhabitants of these regions, some key locations there, and the sorts of things that may be encountered. It can be argued that Norman's focus with these entries is more on worldbuilding than storytelling - which makes them subpar as novels, but quite like a systemless RPG sourcebook, with a narrative attached. Much like the Mystara Gazetteers, these books detail specific parts of the setting and bring them to life, creating a deeper world.

It isn't hard to see how useful this much lore would be for the purposes of roleplaying in the setting. I'm far from the first person to note this - in the 90s, there was a substantial Gorean roleplaying community on IRC, which to my knowledge has mostly moved over to Second Life these days. While, yes, the people here are mostly engaged in a different kind of roleplaying, they still found that the books provided enough material for them to conceivably envision themselves in the roles of characters in the setting - and the same could be said for players in an RPG campaign.

I'm reminded of this post on Erin Hunter's Warrior Cats series, arguing that the series is technically an RPG. Though is is not presented as an RPG, and includes no hard mechanics like stats or die rolls, the setting is detailed and codified enough that one can easily understand how new stories with new characters could be told within the framework of the world - as is evident when one sees the multitude of original characters created by the fandom. Gor is much the same way. Even before it received an RPG, one could argue that the novels provided all the contextual details and dynamics to ground roleplaying in the setting and make sure it was consistent and in keeping with canon.

Of course, the fact that all this worldbuilding is contained in novels (and ones that can prove impenetrable to casual readers) makes for a barrier to entry. Luckily, one should never underestimate the dedication of fetishists. During the boom of Gorean online roleplaying, a number of fan sites sprung up to catalogue the lore of the novels in order for those interested to better understand the setting. In these articles, I've linked extensively to Luther's Gorean Education Scrolls, a series of articles cataloguing various aspects of Gorean worldbuilding originally written for roleplayers. In my opinion, this is the most accessible way to get into Gor, as it presents the relevant setting details without needing to slog through the original context - and it provides plenty of material that would be useful for would-be DMs. It does, however, only cover material through Witness of Gor, the 26th book in the series; more material has been published since. The Gorean Cave provides quotes directly from the text on a number of subjects, but isn't as easy to navigate. There is also an official illustrated encyclopedia released by Postmortem Studios entitled World of Gor; although released in conjunction with the RPG, it does not contain game stats and is targeted at both gamers and enthusiasts of the setting.

2. Highly Non-Flintstonist

One thing we know from all that worldbuilding is that Gor is decidedly not a Flintstonist setting. Goreans do not think, behave, or act like modern-day people do; in fact, that is kind of a recurring theme of the novels. Even besides the presence of widely accepted slavery, there are a number of key differences between Earthling and Gorean society - Luther even has an entire scroll on this. These range from superficial jargon (Goreans say "tal" instead of "hello," and "I wish you well" instead of "goodbye") to characterful bits of background detail (Goreans sit on floors, with free men sitting cross-legged and women and slaves sitting on their knees; we do have a few examples of women sitting cross-legged, and this is seen as a provocatively tomboyish behavior) to things that could impact gameplay or create new challenges (Goreans haggle over prices at stores and do not set fixed prices for items).

With so much detail given to culture and sociology, a campaign set on Gor would provide a great opportunity to immerse players in a truly exotic world, rather than a reskin of their everyday lives. There are many ways this could create enjoyable and engaging roleplaying opportunities. It is true that this sort of thing isn't for everyone; some people may feel intimidated by the thought of portraying a character whose thought processes and the context they exist in are so different from those of the player. And few gamers enjoy having to read a bunch of worldbuilding notes in order to play the setting consistently. Luckily, there are a few aspects of Gor as a setting that make this easier.

3. Historical Parallels

So a Spartan, a Viking, and a Mongol walk into a tavern. They find a table where a Bedouin is engaged in a fierce arm-wrestling match with a Scythian. A samurai is watching from a table where a forest-dwelling amazon lies slumped over drunk. Then a Wookiee gets up and flips his table in a rage.

No, it's not the setup to a very bizarre and esoteric joke. This scene could very well play out on Gor - granted, it would be an unusually cosmopolitan tavern, but nothing says that it couldn't happen.

Gor is a History's Greatest Hits setting, where cultures and locations based on multiple real-life eras coexist simultaneously. Like Howard's Hyborian Age, it's a setting where all sorts of pseudo-historical adventures can take place without anything feeling out of place. In fact, this is justified within the lore of the setting - Gor is a planet located opposite the sun from Earth, and throughout history, the aliens running the planet (it's a long story) abducted humans from different cultures and brought them to Gor, restricting their behavior so that their cultures would stay relatively unchanged over time. Thus, you have a culture descended from the Vikings existing side by side with one descended from Greco-Roman traditions, and so on.

This means that one can get a pretty good idea of what several Gorean cultures are like by perusing the history of the groups they're based on. None of the cultures are an exact match, and some borrow more heavily from real life than others, but there is enough precedent for the different cultures that a newcomer doesn't necessarily need to consume a lot of exposition to get the gist. As a bonus, this also means that if a DM wants to do some worldbuilding of their own and introduce a new culture to their personal Gor, they can do so and have it make sense in the setting - they just need to find a culture Norman hasn't already covered.

They're even being meta
about it now.

4. Isekai

For those not versed enough in weebery, isekai is a Japanese word translating to "other world." It's used to describe stories where the protagonists come from a mundane world like our Earth, but are transported to a new, fantastic setting. It's become very popular in anime in recent years, but the term has also been used to describe classic fantasy stories like The Wizard of Oz or John Carter of Mars.

Gor is also a setting that lends itself to the isekai route. Those same aliens that abducted a bunch of historical people also routinely abduct modern-day humans, on a much smaller scale. Most of the series' protagonists are brought from Earth to Gor this way, usually as slaves, but sometimes for other reasons. This is useful for gaming purposes because it provides an easy excuse for PCs to not know everything about the setting.

A big reason isekai is so popular in anime is that it allows writers to portray fantastic worlds, but use protagonists the reader can relate to. This way, worldbuilding doesn't have to be delivered through long spans of exposition going over things the characters already know. The details of the world can be revealed to the characters at the same time it is revealed to the viewer. From a TRPG perspective, this would also allow for lore-dense settings to be introduced to players without requiring them to do homework in order to portray characters from that setting. A campaign in which the PCs are humans from Earth brought to Gor allows them to experience the world without it seeming weird if they get details wrong or don't know everything. And discovering more about the world can be a source of progression, allowing PCs to better understand the contexts surrounding them and their places amidst them.

This isn't a new concept in RPGs. Empire of the Petal Throne is known for the richly-detailed setting of Tekumel, which also boasts extensive worldbuilding elaborating on its cultures, social dynamics, mores, and customs. Many players have cited this as an obstacle, as they feel like they can't make characters who conceivably exist as a part of the setting without researching the lore. But this ignores how the setting worked in practice. MAR Barker would, famously, begin most of his campaigns where the PCs were foreigners arriving in Tsolyani lands for the first time. That way, they could discover the setting a little bit at a time, just as the players did, and gradually understand more and more of what was going on around them. A player in a Gor campaign wouldn't need to read all the books in order to understand the setting. Their character wouldn't have to know anything more than they did, and there would be established precedent for it.

5. Points of Light

All these points outline how Gor lends itself well to roleplaying. But what about specifically roleplaying games? Well, there's plenty for that as well. In the leadup to the fourth edition of D&D, Wizards of the Coast described the new default setting as points of light in a sea of darkness - a setting that mostly consisted of unexplored, inhospitable wilderness, with a few scattered, isolated islands of civilization. This way, the setting could feature exploration and high adventure, while still containing enough settled areas for parties to have a home base, as well as the possibility to get themselves involved in social intrigue.

It was a term that caught on, and it has been used to describe a number of different settings, with some noting it as the platonic ideal of an old-school D&D setting. It also happens to describe Gor pretty well. The social assumptions of Gor are grounded more in the ancient Greek polis than medieval feudalism. Each city is a self-sufficient unit with its own government, and its people consider themselves loyal to the city rather than to any higher-reaching state or culture. Cities rarely form colonies, and when they do, these colonies usually become independent once they reach sufficient size. This means that Gor does not really have anything comparable to a wide-reaching kingdom with centralized authority, and as such, there is plenty of wilderness in between the cities. This lends itself well to a campaign framework of traveling from a city to adventure in the wilderness, and then either returning to the city or traveling to another along the road, both of which are often seen in old-school games.

This sort of thing.

6. Megadungeons

Another common feature of old-school campaign settings is the megadungeon - a single dungeon large enough to comprise the setting for an entire campaign, often explored over the course of multiple sessions, with the PCs returning to civilization in between. Some of the earliest campaign settings seem to have grown around a single megadungeon and its adjoining city, like Gygax's Castle Greyhawk. Conveniently, there are a couple of locations described in the Gor novels that resemble megadungeons, or could easily be adapted into them.

One of these is the city of Treve, located in the Voltai Mountains, which forms the setting for Witness of Gor. Treve is a heavily fortified city deep in the mountains, renowned as a haven of thieves and cutthroats; it relies on raiding other settlements for food. The city is only reachable from the air, or through a maze of underground passages, narrow crags, and outposts; even getting there entails braving many dangers. Beneath the city is an extensive network of pits, tunnels, and corridors used to hold prisoners, with traps to prevent their escape. Is there anything more OSR than a lawless city of rogues built atop a vast subterranean trap-filled dungeon?

The other is the Sardar Mountains, Gor's holiest site, and the home of the Priest-Kings, the insectoid aliens that style themselves as the god-like rulers of the planet (more on them later). Though the mountains themselves hold cultural importance to Goreans - they are the site of festivals held four times a year where all Goreans may gather to sell wares and settle disputes, and all Goreans are expected to make a pilgrimage there during their lifetime - the Priest-Kings themselves dwell in an underground complex of tunnels and chambers containing strange creatures (including the aforementioned golden beetles) and powerful technology off-limits to the general populace. Surely a campaign involving raiding the Sardar Mountains under the noses of the Priest-Kings could provide plenty of excitement and opportunities for OSR gaming.

I am this entire image.

All in all, I'm not surprised that so many early voices in the TRPG communities embraced Gor - the setting seems almost tailor-made for gaming, especially the sort of gaming that predominated in that era. I have no doubt that more than one DM at the time used the setting for their games. We know such a thing wasn't unheard of - Wilderlands of High Fantasy began as a campaign set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth before the PCs were teleported elsewhere, for instance. Surely people noticed the same points I did and realized how ripe they would be for gaming. And while the Gorean roleplaying community is largely more concerned with the bedroom than the table, a lot of what makes the setting appealing to one circle also makes it appealing to another. In the end, people into RPGs and people into BDSM aren't so different - and we can see that principle at play here.

We're almost done with this series, but before we go, I still have one post left in the tank - one devoted to things I personally find cool about Gor as a setting, now that all the theoretical stuff is out of the way. Until then, I wish you well!

The Year of the Gazetteer: A Retrospective

Click here to enlargee

With the Year of the Gazetteer behind us, I'd like to think back on how much it has done for this blog in the last twelve months. We went from averaging about two and a half posts a month in 2022 and 2023 to having at least 10 a month, with 2024 having 149 posts - my most productive year by far. I created 13 hex maps (counting Ochsebad) of various regions in my long-running Lunar Lands setting, which has hosted almost every campaign I've run since middle school - altogether detailing 33,543 hexes and 229,233 square miles of setting. That's an area a little smaller than Madagascar if smushed together, although the areas are not contiguous. I also wrote several articles, including lore, adventure hooks, and homebrew game material, that detailed different parts of my setting, fulfilling the purpose I made this blog for in the first place but never knew where to start with. Keep your eyes out for a Lunar Lands index in the future, where I will catalogue this material.

I learned a couple things along the way. Originally, I intended to use three-mile hexes for every map - I'm inclined to agree with Mythlands' points about this scale - but as I expanded beyond Switzerland-sized Lescatie I realized that it would just be unfeasible to keep making maps in that scale on a regular basis. After the undertaking that was Togarmah, I realized that even doing six-mile-hex maps of many regions was too big to do in detail, and most of the maps are only partial segments of their respective regions. Nevertheless, I still think there's more than enough to last a good few campaigns. Maybe some day I'll go back and fill in the gaps with hex maps of the remaining areas, but for now, it's a project I'm quite satisfied with.

Out of all the maps, the one that's gotten the most attention has been that of the Freikantons, which has sat in my list of most popular posts for some time now. I suspect this comes from its links to Ochsebad, which I submitted for the Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam at DIY & Dragons, realizing how I could contribute to both projects (which was a lot of fun!). Or maybe bitches just love the Old Swiss Confederacy. Who knows.

From here, I want to go from a big success (at the time of this writing, my post on terrain rules for combat is still my biggest success) to what I consider my biggest failed experiment. This didn't happen last year but the year before, but back then, I wrote a post about how the setting of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica would work well for an OSR campaign. I still think that, but I'm sad to say I don't think that's a campaign that will ever see the light of day. Though the post brought a lot of attention to my blog - even making it onto the OSR subreddit, somehow - a lot of the discourse there made me realize that there is not a lot of overlap between why I enjoyed Madoka Magica and why everyone else did.

I should note that I got into the series very early on in its run, I believe the day it blew up online as soon as the third episode aired (if you know, you know), and at that time, there had not been much in the way of character development; what drew me in was the interesting and very gameable setting and magic system, which seemed like it was going somewhere. I thought that setting would lend itself well to OSR gameplay. However, most of the reception I got was about how OSR systems don't model interpersonal dynamics well, despite me stating this was the aspect of the series I found the weakest. What I realized was that it's been over ten years, and most people now know Madoka Magica for the character-driven show it ended up becoming. I found the setting interesting but the characters unlikeable, whereas the fandom generally finds the characters likeable but the setting uninteresting (or at least unimportant). Nowadays, anyone wanting to play a game in the Madoka Magica universe is probably going to expect a depressed lesbian psychodrama instead of the horror-infused dungeon-delving sandbox about grappling with the limits of your own humanity I wanted to run, and that isn't really the kind of campaign I would be interested in running.

Anyway, I bring all of this up because this experience has taught me absolutely nothing.

Art by Martin Rodriguez

2025: The Year of the Barbarian

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.

- Robert E. Howard

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

Gee, if only I was a half-naked, super-ripped dude who could solve every single problem with one blow from his enchanted blade, THEN maybe I could get some gasoline and a lower interest rate on my home loan.

- Misterkitty's Stupid Comics

Lately, I've gotten deeply into a specific kind of fantasy. Sword-and-sorcery blood-and-thunder barbarian hero pulp heroic fantasy. The likes of Conan, Kull, Red Sonja, Fafhrd, Thongor, we can offer an honorable mention to Dave. While barbarians in the Lunar Lands tend to look more like ancient Celts or Germanics, I can't deny that I don't love myself a good Frazetta or Vallejo mighty-thewed warrior, in its own context.

I've been getting into not only 30s barbarian pulp, but also 70s barbarian comics, a surprisingly deep genre that Trey at From the Sorcerer's Skull has written plenty about. He's even done some writings of a game meant to emulate that milieu. I have him to credit for introducing me to Arak, Son of Thunder, which would have gotten into the Lunar Lands Appendix N had I not discovered it so recently and had there not been other, longer-standing influences to include It got me thinking of how I could do something like that myself - and, in particular, there are a few settings I've looked at that I feel would lend themselves well to such an approach. Neither are my own creation, but both I feel tap into the well of sword and sorcery goodness in their own ways.

One is a setting from the second big wave of pulp fantasy that I find incredibly gameable, and which has had a much bigger influence on the tabletop RPG world than many people realize, most likely due to its (in my opinion undeserved) bad reputation. The other is a setting I have talked about here on the blog several times already, one which, despite its association with another popular comic artist (to the point where most people overestimate how much involvement he had in it), I think would shine with a reinterpretation in the Mighty Marvel Manner under the theoretical pen of Roy Thomas. I intend to explore each of these in a forthcoming series of posts.

I'll still be posting the occasional Lunar Lands lore, of course - but we'll take a detour that will ring in the Year of the Barbarian! Stay tuned for what's to come!

Lunar Lands Appendix N

Whether you want to call it "6e" or "5.5e" or "One D&D" or "D&D 2024" or "the spawn of Satan," the core books for the most recent iteration of D&D's ruleset have hit shelves. I've had a chance to look at them (and what people online are saying about them), and while I would overall call it a mixed bag I don't have much in the way of strong feelings on, there is one decision I find truly concerning. The venerable Appendix N, of inspirational reading and influences on the game, is gone from the Dungeon Masters' Guide, replaced by a "lore glossary" of terms and characters from existing D&D fiction.

I'm sure you already knew I was going to hate this. It's just another nail in the coffin of what I've been arguing since the very beginning of this blog - that in becoming a brand, D&D has become a corporatized, proprietary Human Centipede constantly consuming, excreting, and regurgitating its own lore, and that the rejection of outside influences will just lead to more homogenized cinematic-universe-friendly slop targeted more at investors than gamers.

But rather than focus on how the sky is falling, I would like to use this as an opportunity to do something positive - to discuss the sources that influenced my approach to DMing and worldbuilding, both in content and in philosophy. I've seen other blogs do something similar, and I suppose that with the death of the official Appendix N, it's time to keep that spirit alive through exploring what an Appendix N for the Lunar Lands might look like. So, in no particular order, here are ten things that shaped both myself as a DM and the Lunar Lands as a setting. I might return to these with more detail at a later date, but for now, here's what I have.

National Geographic

1. World culture and history

Ever since I was young, I've had a fascination with how people live and lived their lives, both around the world and in different eras. I'm of the opinion that no fictional universe can ever be quite as deep or as interesting as the real world - even today, there are thousands of societies with their own practices and cultural norms all around the globe, and I find delving into the subject to be just as rich and compelling as any fictional universe bible. I love learning about how people live or lived on the other side of the world, or in a different age. My approaches to worldbuilding take after that interest, both from a superficial perspective and a more in-depth one.

Obviously, the Lunar Lands is very much a History's Greatest Hits setting, with various regions based heavily on different cultures and eras. Even with the Year of the Gazetteer, I've drawn from subjects as diverse as colonial Mexico, the Saami people of Scandinavia, the Holy Roman Empire, and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In rejecting Flintstonism, I make an effort to portray these cultures as people raised in them would have thought and felt, rather than to use them as dressing for contemporary stories - I enjoy doing the research, and I strive to give the worlds I portray a greater level of immersion and verisimilitude through referencing real-world practices, social norms, systems of governance, and other phenomena.

But on a broader scale, I also take inspiration from the diversity of real-world society to make every part of my setting feel distinct from one another, with all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of real cultures. The Lunar Lands has ethnic minorities, diasporas, and stateless peoples - real life isn't so clean that you'll get a society where everyone wears hats, and that's it. That's one thing I like so much about this planet, and I want the same for my setting.

2. Mythology and Folklore

Long before I was into anything we'd call "fantasy literature," I was enamored by the various myths and legends of the world from throughout history. As a child, my image of stories of magic, monsters, and the supernatural was more colored by fairy tales and ancient myths than pulp speculative fiction. The iconic fantasy heroes, to me, were Odysseus and Beowulf, not Gandalf and Conan. Of particular interest were the Usborne and Kingfisher books that presented a glossary of gods, heroes, and stories from around the world, with beautiful illustrations that brought these tales to life. When I began running campaigns, I didn't have ready access to modules or setting guides, so these were the sourcebooks I used instead to get inspiration for my next game.

One of my players has described the tone of the Lunar Lands as "more fairy tale than fantasy novel," and that's a description that's stuck with me. I draw inspiration from real-life folklore whenever possible. If a creature in the Monster Manual has abilities that are at odds with what ancient people believed about its namesake, nine times out of ten, the ancient people are going to win out. My gods take human form, meddle in mortal affairs, and are fond of cursing people for arbitrary reasons, rather than passively sitting around rewarding prayer with spells. Add in my Catholic upbringing introducing me to the various saints, miracles, and folk rituals of Europe and beyond, and you have a setting where the fantastic has a more grounded, mythical feel - even if there's room for beholders and displacer beasts too.

I'm pretty sure either
I had this cover,
or my teacher did.

3. The Hobbit

That isn't to say that modern fantasy literature hasn't influenced my setting. Far from it. When I was raised on a diet of myths and legends, it was only natural that I would move on to the works of Tolkien when I was older, and that I would be enamored with it from the beginning. My first exposure to Tolkien's work was The Hobbit, a book that one of my teachers decided to read to us over lunch period, and it didn't take long for me to be hooked.

I've always preferred The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings - the first of the movie adaptations of which came out just after we had finished The Hobbit, in a stroke of good timing - and while I suspect nostalgia plays a part here, I also find the tone, scale, and scope of the story resonates more with me. The world of The Hobbit has a more folkloric character than what would come later. A big part of it, I feel, is that Tolkien is content to just let things happen, without needing to justify it through worldbuilding. Animals talk. Bags talk. People just have magic items lying around. Elves are bothersome tricksters, not wise mentors. There are encounters with strange creatures that Tolkien never attempts to fit into a greater and more cohesive world. I always hate when fans try to explain away the giants playing catch in the mountains as a metaphor, citing that giants aren't mentioned in any other Middle-Earth stories - maybe there are just giants in this world, and that's okay. My setting strives to work in much the same way.

The Hobbit, compared to its sequel, is more concerned with a singular adventure, making it feel more intimate and relatable than a grand sweeping epic where the fate of the world lies in the balance. That's a tone I try to capture with my setting, but I'm also influenced by the structure of The Hobbit. The story is an episodic one, told through a number of incidents along the journey that are largely self-contained. When my players are seeking out a destination, I always make sure to have plenty of interesting locations along the way - whether they be dangers or potential allies and resources. And, just as Bilbo and the dwarves rarely overcome their obstacles through force of arms, I like to encourage players to use clever tricks and exploit their environments to get out of a bind.

4. Swashbucklers and Historical Adventure Fiction

Think Ivanhoe, the various Robin Hood stories, The Three Musketeers, Prince Valiant and similar comics, and their legions of adaptations and derivative works on the big screen. This genre is a bit of a lost art - the latest example I can think of is 1991's Prince of Thieves, unless Pirates of the Caribbean counts - and that's really a shame, because they provide a great font of material for interesting plot points and adventure sites.

The Lunar Lands is a low-magic setting, and I think that a big part of that comes from how stories like these have shown me that you can have compelling and dramatic stories in a pre-industrial setting without needing to throw a wizard in there. My games are full of corrupt nobles, daring escapes, and honorable duels; while there are plenty of conventional D&D dungeons, just as many are literal dungeons, where one will have to fight their way out of a scheming baron's castle, braving guards and traps and navigating passages hidden by clever stonework. Of course, doing all of that and throwing a wizard in anyway is fun too!

A lot of swashbucklers are comparable in tone and character to old-school sword and sorcery tales - something I think a lot of people don't realize, especially given Robert E. Howard considered himself a writer of historical fiction - but without the influence of turn-of-the-century weird fiction, they mesh more easily with a setting that's more grounded in myths than Lovecraftian themes. I suspect my lifelong interest in history made these historical adventures more appealing to me, but there's plenty of material there to be mined by any DM.

5. Wilderlands of High Fantasy

Is this one cheating? In the interests of slaying the self-referential ouroboros of modern-day pop culture, I've tried to avoid sources that came from D&D itself. But I'm going to list Wilderlands here. Not only is it a third-party product so I think I can get away with it, it was a profound influence on my approach to worldbuilding and running games. One of the most important moments of my development as a young DM was when I received the 3.5e Wilderlands boxed set as a birthday present. At the time, I had no idea it was a setting that was almost as old as D&D itself. What I was fascinated by was the nature of the product.

The Wilderlands boxed set - apparently something of a collector's item today - is essentially a big collection of hex maps, altogether covering an area about the size of the Mediterranean Sea, with two books detailing every region described therein, and the various points of interest contained within each hex. There's plot hooks, but no overarching narrative. It's meant to be a sandbox you can drop a party into and have them make their own fun. This was a game-changer, for me. It made me realize the virtues of sandbox campaigns, and how you could seed an area with enough interesting encounters to let a party explore it as they pleased. They might save the world. They might become wanted criminals. They might even carve out kingdoms - all of this was anticipated and expected.

That was the kind of campaign I decided I wanted to run. It also got me thinking of how I could design a setting that was just as open-ended, detailed, and diverse. The Wilderlands has a reputation as somewhat of a gonzo setting, with lost technology and alien races, but I never got that impression from the boxed set, and none of that really found its way into my work. What I saw was that I could do something similar in terms of presentation and game philosophy, and I've never looked back.

6. British old school gaming

I've spoken on this subject in the past. As far as I'm aware, I was one of the first people to posit the existence of a distinct tradition of British old school fantasy gaming on the OSR subreddit, and it got some discussion going in its day. I need to revisit that at some point. But I'm of the opinion that there is a distinct pantheon of British RPGs and related material - the tentpoles of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and Dragon Warriors, plus related works and also-rans like Blood Sword, Maelstrom, and the material in old White Dwarf articles and TSR UK's books (yes, that includes the Fiend Folio, so the Flumph and the Space Marine are cladistical cousins!). These works have a distinct feel and their own tropes and conventions, and while I am both American and a 90s kid, they've always appealed to me in a way that American games of the era never did quite as well.

While American games took inspiration from pulp fiction, British games had more of a grounding in history and folklore. Flintstonism was downplayed in favor of accurately depicting medieval culture and society, and often there was a greater influence from fairy tales, Arthurian romance, and other more traditional sources. Things were more grounded in mundanity, providing a contrast to the overtly fantastic, and there was a slant toward low fantasy rather than high fantasy, with PCs being desperate rat-catchers and adventures entailing bogus haunted houses set up to scare locals away from smuggling operations. A lot of this paralleled and overlapped with other areas of interest to me, so I consider the Lunar Lands a British old school fantasy setting, in spirit if not by birth. Since discovering Fighting Fantasy, I've also incorporated much of the series' philosophy into my approach to game design. In those books, a clever player can get out of danger or evade a tough fight by taking an alternate route around or using the right item, and I strive to do the same with my campaigns.

7. Dragon Quest

I've spoken on the subject before, but as a child, I played the Game Boy port of Dragon Quest III extensively, and read the strategy guide even more extensively. The game dates back to an era where Japanese RPGs were only starting to meaningfully diverge from their western counterparts, and III wears its D&D influence on its sleeve, with a party of customizable characters, thieves with utility abilities to be used outside of battle, clerics who can wear armor and use weapons (have you ever seen a white mage do that?), and cursed items that can only be removed by seeking a blessing at a temple. Discovering the game at the same time I was discovering D&D was well-timed. Even if I did recognize the box art was done by the guy I knew from watching Dragon Ball Z on Toonami, I could also recognize the two games as being part of the same canon, and they seemed to complement each other. I always just assumed DQ3 was of the same genre as Might and Magic VII on my family's computer, just designed differently due to technical limitations. In my early days of gaming, I tried to remake my D&D characters in DQ3 (poorly), and I ran several dungeons out of the DQ3 Prima strategy guide at the table.

While the Lunar Lands doesn't have cutesy ooze mascots, I do draw inspiration from how DQ3 - and the greater series, now that I've gotten back into it - presents its world. A big aspect of the games that I think gets left out of the conversation is how open-ended they are. While there are some entries that are more story-driven, the stories tend to be simpler and the worlds more open to exploration than a typical Final Fantasy title. Often times, story arcs are self-contained to a single town or dungeon, hitting on the same episodic nature of a hexcrawl, of Bilbo's journey to the Lonely Mountain, or indeed, of the campaigns I run. Furthermore, the settings tend to play things more traditionally than most JRPGs, and despite Toriyama's art, they feel closer to classic fantasy or folklore than to modern-day anime.

I do, alas, regret to inform anyone who's interested in seeking Dragon Quest out nowadays that the series' English releases changed translators partway through its run, and more modern games have rejected faithful translations in favor of just adding in whatever dumb jokes the translators wanted to tell, regardless of if they fit the intended tone. If you want something with the tone my games aim for, avoid anything with Dragon Quest on the cover and look for Dragon Warrior instead. While I use the official title for clarity's sake, earlier English releases, including those of my youth, were released under Dragon Warrior because TSR owned the trademark to Dragon Quest at the time. Which is ironic, because...

8. Dragon Warriors

Yep, there actually was a TRPG out there called Dragon Warriors, and no one bothered to care. This one falls under the umbrella of British old-school gaming I talked about earlier, but I wanted to devote its own section because its influence is just that strong.

Dragon Warriors takes place in Dave Morris's Land of Legend, a setting based heavily on medieval folklore and culture. It's a setting where people invoke the names of saints so that the fair folk won't cause their milk to curdle and their grain to spoil so they'll be able to pay their tithes to the local lord. When I discovered Dragon Warriors for the first time, my immediate thought was somewhere between "Yes! This is exactly what I've always wanted!" and "Oh no, someone beat me to it." It hits the nail on the head perfectly for what I want out of fantasy grounded in history, myths, and legends, and a lot of Legend content would fit into the Lunar Lands with minimal changes. In fact, I've done exactly that.

Dave Morris is still putting out content today - he's working on a new edition of the rules, titled Jewelspider, and his blog Fabled Lands still releases material for the setting in the form of semi-regular zines and adventures, all of which have that deeply folkloric feel that I can't get enough of, and many of which have made it into the Lunar Lands practically unchanged. I'm only somewhat joking when I call the guy my spiritual liege.

9. The Elder Scrolls

You may have noticed that one of the bigger recurring themes in this list is that I like open-world games that encourage and reward player-driven exploration. It shouldn't come as any surprise that I'm a big fan of The Elder Scrolls, a series that makes this sort of thing its wheelhouse. In turn, it's influenced how I think about campaign design. Most of my campaigns have been set up similarly to a typical Elder Scrolls game, where I might have an overarching plotline, but also seed the world with plenty of locations, sidequests, factions, and NPCs that the players are free to explore as they wish, pursuing different leads and affiliating themselves with different parties. If they want to ignore the main quest entirely and just focus on doing missions for the local guild, or clearing out dungeons, or collecting roots, that's perfectly fine, and they can do that as long as I have interesting material to throw at them.

But more importantly, Elder Scrolls was a heavy influence on me for how it approached its world. Before I played Oblivion, my introduction to the series, I had never seen a video game that felt like a living, breathing world - one that I could see people actually living in, with lives and stories that unfold beyond what's necessary for gameplay. A big part of this is how Elder Scrolls handles its lore. There's much more canon information about the setting than is ever encountered in any of the games, with the world possessing hundreds of books you can read - everything from novels to encyclopedias to biographies, and all expanding on the world of Nirn and making it feel like something greater. That was a big inspiration for me to develop the world of my setting to match. The Lunar Lands doesn't have the weirder metaphysical qualities of Mundus - there's no room for a magical space station (yes, that's canon!) in a world of myths and legends - but the philosophy of creating a setting for a game that's rich and detailed enough to stand on its own drove me to the sorts of thinking that led me to make this blog. Even if some of this stuff never comes up in gameplay, I know it's there, and that's enough for me.

10. Touhou Project

Come on, it wouldn't be a Lunar Lands article without something completely out of left field. Out of all the things I've listed today, this is probably the one most unfamiliar to much of my readerbase, so allow me to explain.

Touhou Project is a long-running series of independently published video games, produced almost entirely by a single Japanese man who goes by the online handle of ZUN. They're arcade-style shooters about poorly-drawn anime girls in funny hats firing excessive amounts of lasers at each other. I haven't played a single one of them. My exposure to Touhou instead comes from its large and devoted fanbase. ZUN has encouraged players to produce fanart and fanfiction of his characters - there are over 100 poorly-drawn anime girls in funny hats that have appeared over the course of the series, each of whom has their own distinct personality and unique quirks, and the fans have been so compelled by them that the majority of Touhou-related content on the internet comes from fans. These range from memes to music videos to professionally-produced manga to an entire animated film. There are entire characters who have no dialogue at all, but the personalities and traits fan works have given them have been so influential they've set the model for how they're portrayed in other productions.

But what on earth, you might ask, does this have anything to do with the Lunar Lands? Well, Touhou is heavily inspired by Japanese folklore. The characters and their abilities are all based on mythical beings, Shinto and Buddhist traditions, and urban legends, and much of the series's appeal comes from seeing how these entities are reimagined and how they interact with one another. Very rarely is something created completely out of whole cloth. Though the cultural backgrounds I draw from are different, it's a philosophy I apply in my worldbuilding as well, creating cosmologies and magic systems out of real folkloric traditions and basing characters on precedents found in myths. Another one of my players compared my setting to a European Touhou, and while the anime influences are not nearly as overt, it is something I've leaned into.

Also, tying back to my first point, I do have to credit Touhou with introducing me to the principles of Shinto, and I find the religion's animist traditions fascinating. The concept of regional shrines, local deities, and items that can gain sentience with time have found them into my setting, and I don't think I would've used the term "shrine maiden" in my setting if not for Touhou. Plus, I almost called this blog "Lunar Land Story," so that should count for something.

With that retrospective on the material behind my setting, I would like to open the floor. Let's not mourn Appendix N. Let's celebrate the rich tapestries of influences behind our games and our settings! If you haven't written anything on the Appendices N for your games, I encourage you to do so. I'm not the first DM to blog about this subject, and I'm sure I won't be the last. I'm interested in hearing from you!