Blog Archives

Jon Peterson’s research over at Playing at the World has lead him to uncover the source of not just D&D’s iconic fireball spell, but also the root of a great many of the Tolkienesque elements that were incorporated into the earliest editions of the game. As he reports there: I was aware of the existence […]

When Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews reported that A. Merritt was influenced by the most significant female science fiction author between Mary Shelly and C. L. Moore, this was something that I had to go see for myself. Merritt produced some of the strangest stories ever made. The chance to see what made his career even […]

Berin Kinsman of Dancing Lights Press has written an extensive post that is relevant to one of the perennial debates of Appendix N discussion: does the Earthsea Trilogy belong on the list or not…? He points out that the setting “does not neatly map to any real-world places of history” and that though it “borrows Tolkien’s […]

A. Merritt’s role in the development Lovecraft’s Mythos stories is well known. Indeed, “The Call of Cthulhu” is pretty much a direct answer to Merritt’s “The Moon Pool”. You hear very little about him among science fiction fans, however. Just in general, they tend to look back on John Campbell’s work as more or less being the birth of […]

What is it that makes weird fiction so weird…? One factor that played into it was that people in the opening decades of the twentieth century might think you weren’t normal if you liked that sort of thing. A “regular guy” like Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t feel comfortable having his name associated with A Princess […]

Gaiseric over at The Dark Heritage blog has a great post that sheds some light on the relationship between Appendix N and the fantasy canon as it stood during the mid-seventies: One point that Jeffro has made repeatedly, but which still seems to bypass the thought processes of many, is that the Appendix N is […]

This newly discovered Lovecraft letter is quite the find. Even better, you don’t have to travel to some New England area university library to get a look at it. (I’ve noticed that people with a grossly batrachian aspect tend to trail me when I’m in that neck of the woods anyway.) That’s right, the whole thing […]

It’s difficult to find a stopping place with something like Appendix N. The forty-three installments of this series delve only into the books that Gary Gygax singled out in particular, and for the authors that he recommended their entire body of works, I only covered a single novel. Then there are the series that he […]

The authors of Appendix N had a far greater impact on the design of D&D than they get credit for. The scope of Andre Norton’s influence even spilled over into Tunnels & Trolls, Gamma World and Traveller, but the debt that gaming owes her is largely unrecognized. Far from gaining an appreciation for the roots […]

The extent of Tolkien’s influence on the formation of the Dungeons & Dragons game is the subject of countless arguments. Most of what Gary Gygax as said on this topic is generally dismissed out of hand as being a transparent effort to avoid legal hassles from the Tolkien estate. Of course, the co-designer of the […]