What is Your Appendix N?

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Voros

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So I thought it might be fun if we discussed what our personal Appendix N or Moldvay's 'Source for Inspirational Reading' is.

How you define that is up to you but I'd suggest we keep the list to a Top Ten so it doesn't become too unwieldy.

It could be what sources of fiction or with Moldvay's list as an example non-fiction that inspires your play now, or a list of what inspired your play when you first started playing rpgs.

Or anything else you think of, Gygax mentions comics and films but doesn't list any but no reason we can't.

My Appendix N is going to take the approach of what I was most into when I discovered and played D&D as a kid and a teen.

Ironically although I was obsessed with D&D as a kid I was never a big fantasy or sf fiction reader until my early adulthood so some of my choices will range from the obvious to the odd.

Here is my list in no particular order.

1. Conan the Barbarian/Savage Sword of Conan

I read some scattered Howard stories as a kid but this film directed by Milius and written by Oliver Stone and the B&W Savage Sword had the much bigger impact on me until I came to read Howard more extensively as an adult.

Savage Sword I loved for the B&W art, shocking (to me) violence and occasional nudity.

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2. The Hobbit

Obvious sure but one of the few fantasy novels I was taken with as a kid. Still prefer it to LotR as (among other things) I think Bilbo is more interesting as a protagonist and Smaug is a great villain.

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3. Dune

The Lynch film was my Star Wars as a kid. I watched it so often I still have large chunks of the over-the-top dialogue memorized.

Odd that I only got around to reading the book years later although I'm slowly working my way through a re-read now in between other books.

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4. Excalibur/The Once and Future King

Excalibur was another film I was obsessed with as a kid, it seemed to be on afternoon TV all the time and it led me to White's masterpiece which remains one of the best fantasy novels I've read. If anything it set the bar so high that one reason I didn't become a big fantasy reader until later in life was because most of what I encountered didn't measure up to it. This novel and film is why I instantly bought Pendragon when I discovered it hidden on the shelf in the local comic shop and opened my mind to a world of games beyond D&D.


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5. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.

This post-apocalyptic sf novel with its psionic mutant kids struck my imagination like few others and led me to read a long string of very 70s/80s post-apoc sf novels for teens, which led me to my next pick...

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6. Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells.

This book moved and scarred me in equal measure as a kid. It hit me at just the right time as it at first seems to play to an adolescent's fantasies about what a post-apoc world would be like before crushing those fancies with one of the most realistic portraits of what a post-nuclear war world would really be like comparable to the equally devasting TV film Testament.

I grew up next to a military base and went to school with navy brats who enrolled in cadets, etc. so nuclear war haunted my imagination like little else (besides girls) in the 1980s.

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7. The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. My grognard credentials just went out the window since I wasn't milk fed on a steady diet of Moorcock and Leiber like alot seem to claim.

I can't recall what came first, this cartoon or one of my older brothers bringing home the Red Box and roping his younger brothers into playing. But I loved this cartoon as a kid, probably moreso than He-Man and Transformers but definitely not as much as Star Blazers, Robotech and Looney Tunes.

Today like a lot of 80s Saturday morning cartoons I find it very bad indeed but I retain those fond memories.

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8. Endless Quest books. Again, terminally uncool and slighted by modern adult gamers, especially when compared to Fighting Fantasy but these books were beloved by me and many other kids in my youth.

For some reason I never encountered FF which I'm sure I'd have obsessed over. But it was the wonderful interior artwork by Jeff Easley, Jim Holloway and Larry Elmore that engaged as much, if not more, than the CYOA books themselves.

When I found a few used I was shocked to find how much the artwork had burrowed into my mind. Mountain of Mirrors and Return to Brookmere must have been the ones I owned as those are the ones I most remember.

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9. Heroes, Gods and Monsters by Bernard Evslin. Evslin's modern retelling of classic myths for young readers, including most memorably for me the terrible Fall of Troy, is a model for clean, polished prose that didn't shy away from the often horrific content of the original tales.

Read this when I was 12 or 13 and it was ground zero for blowing my mind. I loved how fantastic, violent and sexual these old Greek myths were.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, I would have referred to it as 'dark,' it was the consistently tragic nature of these myths that most engaged me.

It also wiped out any ideas I may have had that people from the past were somehow ignorant or less sophisticated as we were as the world-weary stoicism and wisdom of the Greek viewpoint of life so resonated with me then and now.

It led me to read the Iliad, the Odyssey, ancient poetry and history and even via the backdoor to Joyce's masterful Dubliners.

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10. The Adventures of Robin Hood. So yeah, another movie but what a movie. This film is pure joy from start to finish when Flynn walks in with a deer on his back until the climatic and still classic swordfight with the death of the wonderful Basil Rathbone.

This film opened my young mind to the fact that older films weren't really 'old' and in tone inspired so much of what I wanted from a fantasy game but only captured in flashes.

Trying to get this feel into a game is what drove me to seek out lighter, quicker systems I think as 2e D&D got bogged down in layers and layers of rules and options.

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This is a great thread, and a continual topic of discussion around my gaming table. I have a core group of books which influenced my early gaming and I suspect that core hasn't changed a lot over the decades, but my family has read essentially none of those books.

For me it would be the following (in no definite order)
1. Robert E. Howard. Mostly the ACE Conan series, but other characters as I found them. Howard told stories in a way none have duplicated.
2. Fritz Leiber. Fafhrd & the Grey mouser tales read like early D&D adventures, but were written before OD&D.
3. Tolkien. My concept of elves and dwarves and hobbits and wizards and .... well, they often came from the Professor.
4. Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter and Barsoom and the "save the princess" model of storytelling is amazing.

Those are the books that grabbed me the most in my teens, and the ones that shaped my concept of what an RPG game "ought" to look like. Later I would add a couple more.
5. Michael Moorcock. Elric and Corum and others having a battle of law versus chaos.
6. Roger Zelazny. Amber and Dilvish and Lord Demon help to define the smartass character.
7. Jim Butcher. (Much later, obviously.) The Dresden Files shaped my idea of a modern magic campaign. My favorite living author.

I'd prefer for my personal Appendix N to be short, and not a list of every book on my shelf. Those are mostly the books that I've read over and over and continue to serve as the inspiration for the way I see RPGs.

Now, the problem I have is that my wife is more into Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey, my sister likes mysteries and Watership Down, and my son is into Warhammer and 40K fiction. Not much intersection in the Venn Diagram, sadly, so things that my high school buddied "just got" in the 70's often have to be explained in greater depth to my current group. :sad:
 
I may be odd here, but I think the first fantasy novel I ever fully read was by Terry Pratchett. Followed by T.H White and Michael Moorcock. I actually only ready Tolkien stuff later on. I’m not sure if this coloured my perspective.
 
This is a great thread, and a continual topic of discussion around my gaming table. I have a core group of books which influenced my early gaming and I suspect that core hasn't changed a lot over the decades, but my family has read essentially none of those books.

For me it would be the following (in no definite order)
1. Robert E. Howard. Mostly the ACE Conan series, but other characters as I found them. Howard told stories in a way none have duplicated.
2. Fritz Leiber. Fafhrd & the Grey mouser tales read like early D&D adventures, but were written before OD&D.
3. Tolkien. My concept of elves and dwarves and hobbits and wizards and .... well, they often came from the Professor.
4. Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter and Barsoom and the "save the princess" model of storytelling is amazing.

Those are the books that grabbed me the most in my teens, and the ones that shaped my concept of what an RPG game "ought" to look like. Later I would add a couple more.
5. Michael Moorcock. Elric and Corum and others having a battle of law versus chaos.
6. Roger Zelazny. Amber and Dilvish and Lord Demon help to define the smartass character.
7. Jim Butcher. (Much later, obviously.) The Dresden Files shaped my idea of a modern magic campaign. My favorite living author.

I'd prefer for my personal Appendix N to be short, and not a list of every book on my shelf. Those are mostly the books that I've read over and over and continue to serve as the inspiration for the way I see RPGs.

Now, the problem I have is that my wife is more into Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey, my sister likes mysteries and Watership Down, and my son is into Warhammer and 40K fiction. Not much intersection in the Venn Diagram, sadly, so things that my high school buddied "just got" in the 70's often have to be explained in greater depth to my current group. :sad:
All of those are important authors for me - Zelazny & Burroughs slightly less for me than the others, but all good. Have run 2 campaigns in the Dresdenverse.

I would add
David Gemmell - really strong story's, with flawed characters seeking redemption. Heroic, but with a seam of darkness and happy endings not guaranteed.
Joe Abercrombie - very well written characters. His playing of WHFRP definitely evidenced. Dark, cynical, but understands his characters flaws and makes them likeable.
Jack Vance - wonderfully ornate and droll fantasy. Love his imagination, best writer of Science Fantasy IMHO.
 
Oh man, this is going to be tough.

1. Thundarr the Barbarian.

There was nothing else like it on Saturday morning cartoons. The look and tone was so different from what I was use to seeing at the time that it stuck with me always.

2. Beastmaster.

I use to watch this on our VCR regularly, we lived isolated and only had three over-the-air channels. One of the residents would record movies off his satellite and loan out his tapes. Beast Master was PG with eye-opening nudity.

3. The Black Company.

My introduction to grimdark. Croaker, One Eye, Goblin, Silent, The Lady, all highly influential on me.

4. Savage Sword of Conan.

I loved the black and white art and the more “mature” tone of the stories.

5. Princess of Mars

Dejah Thoris and a dying Mars captured my imagination early. The Frazetta art did not hurt.

6. Lord of the Rings

These covers in particular set the look of Middle Earth in my mind.

7. Dragon Riders of Pern

What could be better, riding dragons and breathing fire!

8. Dune series 1-6

I first read all six of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels over the summer of my 6th grade. So much was over my head but I keep returning to the series every few years as more and more was revealed based on my growing knowledge.

9. Robert E Howard

More than just the creator of Conan, Howard wrote so much across many genres.

10.Flash Gordon

The costumes, set design, music, purple prose delivered with enthusiasm! What is not do love?

Bonus mention of Flash Gordon The Greatest Adventure of All Time cartoon.
 
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Heavy Metal Magazine (Moebius, Druillet, Bilal, etc...)
Old horror comics like Boris Karloff Presents and The Twilight Zone
Mickey Spillane - the pre-60s stuff, a bit sleazier than a lot of other hardboiled detective tales
I Love A Mystery/Adventures By Morse - an old radio show with 3 friends solving spooky mysteries
Dragnet - another old radio show, full of odd 'true-crime' stories, surprisingly grim at times
Thomas Ligotti - weird short stories
Junji Ito - Japanese horror comics, especially Uzumaki
David Lynch - all of it
Grimm's Fairy Tales
1001 Arabian Nights
 
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion
Michael Moorcock: Elric series, Hawkmoon Series, Corum Series, Von Bek Series, Jerry Cornelius quartet, Gloriana, General Pyat Series.
Clarke Ashton Smith: Zothique and collected works
M. R. James: collected ghost stories
Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood series and Celtika trilogy
M John Harrison: Viriconium; Light
Ian M Banks: Culture Series (how I wish he'd tackled a fantasy novel)
Philippe Druillet: Lone Sloane; Yragael/Urm
David Pownall: The White Cutter
Hilary Mantell: Wolf Hall; Bring Up the Bodies; The Mirror and the Light
Bernard Cornwell: The Winter King, Enemy of God, Excalibur; Saxon Chronicles; Stonehenge
Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast (first two books. Avoid the rest); Mr Pye
Harry Kressing: The Cook
Jack Vance: The Dying Earth Series; Lyonesse trilogy; Demon Princes quintet; Planet of Adventure quartet
Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man; Tiger Tiger
Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad; Solaris
Robert E Howard: Conan Series
E R Eddison: The Worm Ourobouros
Terry Nation: Rebecca's World
C S Lewis: Chronicles of Narnia
Alan Garner: Elidor; The Weirdstone of Brisingamen; Red Shift
Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Christopher Priest: The Glamour; The Prestige; The Inverted World; Indoctrinaire; The Dream Archilpelago; A Dream of Wessex
Bryan Talbot: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright; Grandville
Patrick McGrath: The Grotesque

So many more... but these are the essentials.
 
Definitely going to go with some non books. Again in no particular order, apart from some category grouping.

1. Diana Wynne Jones - Charmed Life

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The first author I ever truly fell in love with and I'm still a fan today. Her books are brimming with ideas and world building, with plot twists worthy of a murder mystery writer. And crucially, she always wrote for children, but never wrote down to them. It is my staunchly held view that she's one of the greatest British fantasy writers of last century and that only gets overlooked because of a snobbery about "juvenile" literature.

2. Eva Ibbotson - The Great Ghost Rescue

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Not quite as great as Wynne Jones, but still very good indeed. Where Wynne Jones was fantasy, Ibbotson's strength was modern supernatural and even horror. There's a real warmth and humanity in her books and her characterisation is top notch.

3. Mark Smith & Jamie Thomson - Way of the Tiger

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I toyed with whether to include gamebooks here, but they were undoubtably a major route into RPGs for me. While I played them, I was never that much of a fan of Fighting Fantasy compared to some of the others. These were probably my favourite. Orb was Smith and Thomson's D&D campaign setting and the level of detail showed that. Also, I was the right age to think "martial arts plus high fantasy" was a very cool idea. These also excited me by playing with the format; you got to run a city and make tactical wargame decisions in later books.

4. 2000 AD

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I think you'd be hard pressed to find British roleplayers of a certain generation not influenced by Slaine, Dredd, Nemesis and the rest. Very much a comic that felt of the "now".

5. Misty

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I wasn't quite old enough to get this originally and naturally I wouldn't have been seen buying a "comic for girls" anyway. But the kids I babysat for had all the annuals and I devoured them. From the same publisher and with many of the same writers as 2000 AD, there has never been a comic like Misty before or since. The stories were genuinely spooky, even terrifying. This is best illustrated with an example:
Day of the Dragon — Gayle learns that she is the reincarnation of a young Chinese woman who killed herself to escape a forced marriage to an evil man. But the man, also reincarnated, has now found Gayle and wants to claim his bride

Winner Loses All — Sandy sells her soul to the Devil to save her alcoholic father. The Devil gives her a horse named Satan (conjured to life from a picture on the sign outside a pub) so that Sandy can fulfill her dream of becoming a show-jumping champion; but, if anyone guesses where the horse came from, the deal will be broken and Sandy will go to hell for all eternity.

Fancy Another Jelly Baby? — A girl begins to question why a sweet shop's jelly babies look like the local children who have been reported missing.

Misty's big innovation was understanding that girls like being scared too.

6. Deadline

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Mostly remembered as the comic that brought us Tank Girl, Deadline was to 17 year old me what 2000 AD was to 14 year old me. Full of swearing, sex, drugs and rock and roll (it also did music articles about painfully hip rock bands), it can probably be blamed for my later Vampire LARP career. I believe it was also the first comic I ever saw with boobs in it, which I greatly appreciated.

7. Blue Öyster Cult

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As you might be able to tell, I wasn't into the "classic" fantasy that much. (Quite liked The Hobbit. Got very bored by Lord of the Rings). But why would I need to be, when BÖC had it covered for me with their songs about Godzilla, Nosferatu, Elric and, um, Joan Crawford? This was my entry into a high fantasy world, helped along the way by the fact it rocked and it rocked hard.

8. Hawkwind

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And this was my other "roleplaying band". They made me feel like LSD before I was in fact on LSD. Just look at that album cover. While BÖC visited other worlds, Hawkwind came from them. Any time my fantasy RPG gets weird and gonzo, I think there's a little bit of Hawkwind in there.

9. Knightmare



Another attempt to recreate the magic of RPGs on television. This shouldn't have worked. Get a kid in a helmet so he can't see, get his mates to shout advice at him and have him go through a dungeon via the magic of the green room. And yet... It was glorious. With a level of difficulty that put adult gameshows to shame (in its seven year run only eight teams got through the dungeon), this was Dark Souls before Dark Souls. Absolutely no patronising "everyone wins" here. You were almost certainly going to die horribly. (I had a real issue with being talked down to as a kid).

10. Dramarama



An ITV children's series of one off dramas, most of which had a supernatural or sci fi theme. I found out years later this was part of a power struggle between the new and old guard at the ITV children's department and this made perfect sense. This wasn't Auntie Beeb trying to educate me, this was shows for me with a cast who took that seriously.
 
Local library had tons of Arthur C Clarke when I was a kid, and I just lived his stuff for a couple of years.

Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories.

William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories.

Hammer horror and the old Universal monster flicks played late-night on the BBC (BBC2 I think).

The TV version of Salem's Lot led me to Steven King. Scared myself shitless reading it as a 10 year old.

A Scholastic book of horror stories by some chap called Lovecraft.

The Hobbit was a relatively late find and it just clicked with me. It was... perfect.

Maps. Any map is the gateway to a new world.

To be honest, growing up in a rural Scottish village in the 70s sealed a lifelong interest in places, people, ruins. There were rivers to play in, hills to climb, and we were overlooked by two Iron-Age hillforts. The remains of reiver pele towers were scattered along the valley.

My grandparents' copies of National Geographic, when we visited (I mean, they lived nearly 20 miles away!)

I was a sickly child with asthma, and my mum would bring piles of unsold magazines back from the local newsagents when I caught a chest infection. All sorts of things from history to the supernatural.

I grew up with Pertwee and Tom Baker as Dr Who.

I remember watching some of the later moon landings on TV.

While I've travelled and worked around the world, and explored as a hiker and backpacker, the perilous lure of people and places that never existed, or that I could never visit, has stayed with me all that time.
 
I was young enough when I got into D&D (9 years old) that I didn’t have much preconceived notion of fantasy - I knew fairy tales and He-Man toys and that was about it. So when I did start reading fantasy books it was already in the context of D&D - Endless Quest and Dragonlance books, kids’ books of King Arthur and Greek mythology, The Hobbit, The Sword of Shannara, The Once and Future King, etc. When I was in about 7th grade (~13 years old) I started making an effort to read the Appendix N books - Howard, Leiber, Vance, de Camp & Pratt, Anderson, Moorcock, Zelazny, Burroughs, Lovecraft. After that I “outgrew” fantasy books and didn’t really read much of anything else in that genre until after college. So I came late to non-Appendix N fantasy.

That said, I have gotten more into that stuff over the past 20 years or so. So, going not from what inspired me as a kid but what inspires me now, it’s something like this (I don’t have time to write supporting essays describing what I like or draw from each of them, so it’s just a list, but maybe I’ll come back and fill in more details later):

1. Gary Gygax

2. Jack Vance

3. Fritz Leiber

4. David Lynch - Twin Peaks

5. Stephen King - Dark Tower

6. Lord Dunsany

7. Westerns

8. Herodotus

9. Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast

10. Micheal Shea - Nifft the Lean
 
I began in a sort of inspiration loop, my D&D gaming being informed by D&D novels like Dragonlance, some Mystara novels, and the Forgotten Realms Drizzt books. I was also inspired by the Conan movies.

As a D&D-playing adult, I picked up a collection of Howard’s Conan stories on a whim, and that drastically changed my taste in fantasy, and subsequently, in RPGs. I started reading Lieber, Moorcock, and Karl Wagner. My new love of sword & sorcery led me to Mongoose’s Conan, which led me to Mongoose RuneQuest, and finally landed me at Mythras. Now I’m reading Gemmell’s Drenai series, with Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles waiting in the queue.
 
When discovered D&D in '77-78 had already read tons of SciFi and Fantasy. Leaned towards the REH, Leiber, ERB's Pellucidar tales, and Gardner Fox (little know but well worth tracking down) on the swords and sorcery side with a lot of HPL as well :smile: Could appreciate Moorcock from a stylistic perspective and liked the adventure but his anti-hero stuff seemed reactive, also not much of a fan of Vance. Zelazny (Creatures of Light & Darkness yes!, Amber not so much) had a better contrarian take to me. Jules Verne too. Now movies and TV...20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The Land that Time Forgot, and Land of the Lost :smile:, etc. yes mid-70s stuff.

JRRT had that epic quality, so loved, from reading all the Icelandic Saga's, Beowulf, Bhagavad Gita, many books on Greek Myth, Egyptian Book of the Dead, really anything could get my hands on ancient Egypt, Gilgamesh, and more I am sure. Along with alot of straight up history, hadn't got to my archeology phase yet when encountered D&D, but had read Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and related type works.

So for me a REH (not just his Conan tales)/Beowulf/JRRT with HPL on the side was the setting and feel always wanted, but with more magic as a part of it. What really influenced me on magic was Larry Niven's short story The Magic Goes Away. This was all before encountered D&D, so D&D as a fantasy genre in and of itself was never a thing to me.

On sci-fi it is hard to be fair, read so many books before encountering D&D...so will leave that to another day as this is about the 'ole Appendix N.
 
5. Stephen King - Dark Tower
I love most of what I've read that Stephen King has done, but I really struggle with this series. I bought a copy of The Gunslinger and couldn't get into it. Bought it a second time and enjoyed it more. Bought the entire series as a trade paperback boxed set because some friends had recommended it, but only made it through The Gunslinger again before I stalled out in book #2. Very frustrating because this is supposed to be a great series, but it just doesn't read as smoothly to me as some of his other stuff. :sad:
 
Limiting it to ten means cutting out a lot of stuff, including some of the more obvious suspects. In no particular order:

Ursula K LeGuin - Earthsea

Clark Ashton Smith - Averoigne, Zothique, Hyperborea

Phyllis Ann Karr - Frostflower And Thorn, Frostflower And Windbourne

Michael Moorcock - Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Kane Of Old Mars

Greg Cook - Black Company

C.L. Moore - Jirel Of Joiry

H.P. Lovecraft - Mythos, Dreamlands

Gene Wolfe - New Sun

'Richard Kirk' - Raven

Robert Asprin, Lynn Abbey and other - Thieves' World
 
I think that a lot of the actual Appendix N books were ones I sought out after already being a D&D fan, although I was familiar with Howard and Burroughs and some of the others. And of course I knew of Tolkien.

But besides some of those classics, the major influences on me were probably Star Wars and I think the Dragonlance Chronicles novels, as much as that’s hard to say. I was just the right age for those books to seem like so much fun. Movies like Conan and Beastmaster certainly helped, along with a ton of comics (including only a little Conan).

After that, I think I started branching out with my reading, including hunting down a lot of Leibe, Moorcock, and Lovecraft. Stephen King is a huge influence.

A few others I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned....Stoker, Stevenson, and Shelley. I had a collected version of Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, and Frankenstein that I read a bunch of times.

In more recent years, I’d say Joe Abercrombie is great. I love his tone and his characters are vivid as hell. Scott Lynch and Patrick Rothfuss are both very good, too.
 
Depends on the game, to be honest. I don't have the same Appendix N for every game, so for superheroes, there was my list of suggested reading in H&S1 plus 2E: Books: Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Astro City (Comic, Kurt Busiek), Planetary (Comic), God Loves, Man Kills (X-men Graphic Novel), X-men: Days of Future Past (comic), Rising Stars (Comic), Peer Review (Short story), and other Michael Stackpole super materials--expanded to include his recent super short stories as well as "In the Hero Years..I'm Dead", Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Tv Series), Psycho (Mini-Trade, Hudnall & Brereton), also Brereton's Nocturnals, Liberty Project (Kurt Busiek), Futurians (Dave Cockrum), the MLJ Supers/Blue Ribbon/Red Circle Comics (Shield, Fly, Web, Jaguar, Steel Sterling, Comet, etc.), Supreme (Warren Ellis's run), Top 10, DNAgents, T.h.u.n.d.er Agents, Blue Beetle (Jaimie Reyes), Ghost Rider (Blaze and Ketch, though not recent series.), Justice Society of America: Justice Be Done, and related books. Kingdom Come, Noble Causes, Dynamo 5, X-men (till sometimes in the '90s), Spider-Man (till the 90's ish, though recent runs have been good), Moon Knight (early runs, when he borrowed more from the Shadow than was a crazy man, though some recent stuff has been good here too.) Justice League of America/Justice League Unlimited (Animated series), Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, in fact, MOST DC animated movies and several of their series are fantastic--some were not, Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not all, definitely Black Panther though, Iron Man I, Captain America I, Avengers 1&2, Ant-Man-both)

And I'm tired, and still not finished. :grin: *LOL* but that's a START.

Fantasy? Post-Apocalypse? Sci-Fi? I'll come back later. For those.
 
I could probaby do one for every genre, and might later on if the thread lasts, but I figure I'll go unusual and start with my Appendix N for superheroes.

So this is not strictly a list of "my favourite" superhero comics & media (though obviously there is some crossover), rather a list of those superhero stories that most directly inspire and translate into how I run Supers RPGs - structure, content, and the way heroes, teams, secret identities & the introduction of villains are handled . Thus, I've left off a lot of the more avant-garde or deconstructive stuff lhat might otherwise make one of my general top ten lists .

1. Spectacular Spider-man by Greg Weisman et al

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2. Hellboy / The Mignolaverse by Mike Mignola et al

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3. DC Animated Universe by Timm & Dini

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4. The Goon by Eric Powell

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5. Amazing Spider-man (The Original Continuity)

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6. The Spirit by Will Eisner

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7. Doom Patrol & The Invisibles by Grant Morrison & Various


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8. Invincible by Robert Kirkman & Various

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9. X-Force & X-Statix by Milligan & Alred

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10. Fantastic Four by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

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I can look at everything on this list and note it's influence on both my approach to running Supers campaigns, and designing Phaserip.

But it is a bit frustrating trying to limit it to ten (even if I crammed as much as possible into each of those slots), so here is a not-even-close-to-comprehensive list of runner ups:

All-Star Superman, Astro City, Batman (The Dennis O'Neil Run), Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman: The Long Halloween, Daredevil (The Bendis Run), Daredevil: Man Without Fear, DC: The New Frontier, Deadpool (The Joe Kelly Run), Excalibur (Alan Davis Run), Incredible Hulk (The Peter David Run), Fantastic Four (The Waid/Weiringo Run), JLA: Year One, One Punch Man, Planetary, Promethea, Sandman Mystery Theatre, Spectacular Spider-man (The Gerry Conway/ Sal Buscema Run), Spider-man 2099, Starman, Superman & Batman: World's Finest (by Steve Rude), Top Ten, Uncanny X-Men (The Claremont Run), Warlock (The Jim Starlin run), Wolverine ( The Larry Hama Run)
 
8. Hawkwind

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And this was my other "roleplaying band". They made me feel like LSD before I was in fact on LSD. Just look at that album cover. While BÖC visited other worlds, Hawkwind came from them. Any time my fantasy RPG gets weird and gonzo, I think there's a little bit of Hawkwind in there.

Personal experience for me from Hawkwind came after my grandfather died at a relatively young age, leaving a relatively large family (9 siblings). My youngest uncle, who was about 10 years older than me and still in his teens, took it badly. As such, my grandmother gave him permission to paint his room as he was quite artistically gifted at school, and it was seen as a good way for him to help cope with his emotions and stuff. I was actually sharing the same room as him during this time (complicated family), so it was quite an experience when he chose to paint this on the ceiling:

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The rest of the room was painted totally black interspersed with stars and nebulae, along with some written words taken from a Michael Moorcock novel. It took him about 6 months to complete.

I’d say, in retrospect, it was probably my first formative experience with the fantasy genre as a concept. I also got hooked on his record collection too.
 
Collected works of Pratchett and Douglas Adams mostly. I couldn't point to a specific text out of that very large pile but they are definitely a strong source for how I tend to portray things stylistically.

Joe Clifford Faust's Files of Pembroke Hall, in large part because it showed me how to have outlandish things treated in a mundane way but still appear absurd to the players.

Pynchon's V. and Crying of Lot 49 for how I tend to handle conspiracy and mystery games - farcically, and often with multiple groups colliding with each other and misunderstanding what's going on rather than a true mastermind controlling things.

George Eliot for stories of manners and social politics and anything that appears in a 19th-century European tech level. That's 19th-century British Lit for me in general but I prefer to focus on content from the pre-1880s to avoid falling into really common devices one now finds in Steampunk, and I just happen to like Eliot's style best.

Tennyson's Idylls of the King is going to come up a lot in my Pendragon campaign as we move out of the Anarchy and past the Boy King period.

Edit: It occurs to me I don't have a lot of contemporary non-satirical fantasy texts in this for an Appendix N, but I haven't really read many fantasy novels in a couple of decades. I do like Leiber but Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser aren't really strong influences when I'm DMing.
 
Just sticking to my early, formative influences, the stuff the settles deep into one's DNA:

  • Stan Lee/jack Kirby on the Fantastic Four
  • The movies of John Ford
  • Thundarr the Barbarian (which is again Jack Kirby and Steve Gerber)
 
I was young enough when I got into D&D (9 years old) that I didn’t have much preconceived notion of fantasy - I knew fairy tales and He-Man toys and that was about it. So when I did start reading fantasy books it was already in the context of D&D - Endless Quest and Dragonlance books, kids’ books of King Arthur and Greek mythology, The Hobbit, The Sword of Shannara, The Once and Future King, etc. When I was in about 7th grade (~13 years old) I started making an effort to read the Appendix N books - Howard, Leiber, Vance, de Camp & Pratt, Anderson, Moorcock, Zelazny, Burroughs, Lovecraft. After that I “outgrew” fantasy books and didn’t really read much of anything else in that genre until after college. So I came late to non-Appendix N fantasy.

That said, I have gotten more into that stuff over the past 20 years or so. So, going not from what inspired me as a kid but what inspires me now, it’s something like this (I don’t have time to write supporting essays describing what I like or draw from each of them, so it’s just a list, but maybe I’ll come back and fill in more details later):

1. Gary Gygax

2. Jack Vance

3. Fritz Leiber

4. David Lynch - Twin Peaks

5. Stephen King - Dark Tower

6. Lord Dunsany

7. Westerns

8. Herodotus

9. Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast

10. Micheal Shea - Nifft the Lean

Dunsany's a good one! Didn't read his stuff until my 30s though.
 
This is the list of Early things that first come to mind:

1. John Carter Warlord of Mars
2. Conan & Solomon Kane
3. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
4. Marvel Comics of the 1980s
5. Lord of the Rings

Then Later in my life:

1. Terry Pratchett
2. Neil Gaiman
3. Blade Runner
4. The Aliens Franchise
5. 8 years in the military
 
Nobody mentioned the Pyromancer:shock:?
This is my go-to what wizards should be...if you're playing Ars Magica, that is. And possibly Exalted, the Witcher, Traxas, Vlad Taltos, such games.
For all other games, I don't want wizards to be even close to it. Way too OP:grin:!

Also, in rough order...

Non-fiction books pertaining to different subjects that might be of interest to PCs and assorted NPCs.
Bulgarian, Slavic and Asian fairy tales.
The Illyiad & the Odyssey.
The Hero Must Be One and the other books from G.L.Oldie's Mythic Cycle & the Oikumena cycle.
Rafaelo Sabatini's and A. Dumas' works.
REH's Conan, Kane and Kul stories. Possibly the boxing ones, too.
Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series.
The Witcher and everything else by Sapkowski.
Traxas
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Vlad Taltos
Triplanetary
The Dumarest series
Barry Eisler's John Rain
The Flat Earth series and everything else from Vance, and from CAS as well, for that matter. (Hey, I need villains, too!)
Assorted other authors, obviously influenced by the same sources, of which Christian Cameron gets a honorary shout-out.
 
I think I was thirteen when I got into the D&D in 1987 and I wasn't a big fantasy reader at that time, but I was obsessive about drawing, painting and did love me some cartoons and fantasy movies so my Appendix N was pretty heavily influenced by visual media.

Books & Comics:
1. The Hobbitt - I read this when I was about 8 or 9 and re-read it all the time for years thereafter. I think I bounced off of Lord of the Rings the first time I tried it at 11 or 12.
2. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths - This thing was in my elementary school library and from about 3rd grade all the way through 6th I would read this thing at lunch and constantly check it out and re-check it out. The illustrations were amazing and the world it depicted made me wish I'd been born 3,000 years earlier.
3. Treasure Island - The idea of going off to adventure with pirates as a small boy seemed pretty awesome at the time.
4. Groo - I loved all things Mad Magazine, so getting hooked on Sergio Argonnes brain-dead barbarian was easy. Groo ultimately lead me to reading Conan stories, first the Robert Jordan books from Tor, then De Camp, and finally I stumbled on to Howard in my late teens and realized what I had been missing so that was pretty cool too.
5. Hawkmoon - I think I read this at almost the same time I started playing D&D, but maybe like a month or two before? A good friend of mine loaned it to me and I don't think I ever gave it back. Thereafter I think I tried to checkout every book by Moorcock that was available at the public library. I remember actively disliking Elric at the time, but I loved Corum, the Oswald Bastable books, Von Bek, and could barely make heads or tails of Jerry Cornelius

Films & TV:
1. Thundarr The Barbarian - The weird mix of science-fantasy in a ruined far future earth really struck a nerve and probably explains why I love Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun so much.
2. Ridley Scott's Legend - Even then I thought Tom Cruise sucked, but Tim Curry's Lord of Darkness and the visual design of the goblins and the faeries is still the image I have in my mind of fantasy. I think I was mildly disappointed at how banal goblins were in D&D when I finally encountered them later that year.
3. Dragonslayer - I remember being struck by how bleak and hopeless the world portrayed in this movie seemed at the time and how unfair it was that all of these girls were being sacrificed to appease the dragon, but it definitely informed my perception of quasi-medieval life
4. Time Bandits - This movie blew my mind when I saw it. I remember feeling really jealous that the little boy got to go live with the ancient greeks for a time and I always resented that they didn't let him chill out with Sean Connery in his palace. This started my life-long love affair with Terry Gilliam's films, and there's always a little bit of his surreal, absurdist crap floating around in the fantasy games I've run.
5. Clash of the Titans - Who wouldn't want to wear a helm of invisibility and ride around on Pegasus?
 
I think I was thirteen when I got into the D&D in 1987 and I wasn't a big fantasy reader at that time, but I was obsessive about drawing, painting and did love me some cartoons and fantasy movies so my Appendix N was pretty heavily influenced by visual media.

Books & Comics:
1. The Hobbitt - I read this when I was about 8 or 9 and re-read it all the time for years thereafter. I think I bounced off of Lord of the Rings the first time I tried it at 11 or 12.
2. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths - This thing was in my elementary school library and from about 3rd grade all the way through 6th I would read this thing at lunch and constantly check it out and re-check it out. The illustrations were amazing and the world it depicted made me wish I'd been born 3,000 years earlier.
3. Treasure Island - The idea of going off to adventure with pirates as a small boy seemed pretty awesome at the time.
4. Groo - I loved all things Mad Magazine, so getting hooked on Sergio Argonnes brain-dead barbarian was easy. Groo ultimately lead me to reading Conan stories, first the Robert Jordan books from Tor, then De Camp, and finally I stumbled on to Howard in my late teens and realized what I had been missing so that was pretty cool too.
5. Hawkmoon - I think I read this at almost the same time I started playing D&D, but maybe like a month or two before? A good friend of mine loaned it to me and I don't think I ever gave it back. Thereafter I think I tried to checkout every book by Moorcock that was available at the public library. I remember actively disliking Elric at the time, but I loved Corum, the Oswald Bastable books, Von Bek, and could barely make heads or tails of Jerry Cornelius

Films & TV:
1. Thundarr The Barbarian - The weird mix of science-fantasy in a ruined far future earth really struck a nerve and probably explains why I love Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun so much.
2. Ridley Scott's Legend - Even then I thought Tom Cruise sucked, but Tim Curry's Lord of Darkness and the visual design of the goblins and the faeries is still the image I have in my mind of fantasy. I think I was mildly disappointed at how banal goblins were in D&D when I finally encountered them later that year.
3. Dragonslayer - I remember being struck by how bleak and hopeless the world portrayed in this movie seemed at the time and how unfair it was that all of these girls were being sacrificed to appease the dragon, but it definitely informed my perception of quasi-medieval life
4. Time Bandits - This movie blew my mind when I saw it. I remember feeling really jealous that the little boy got to go live with the ancient greeks for a time and I always resented that they didn't let him chill out with Sean Connery in his palace. This started my life-long love affair with Terry Gilliam's films, and there's always a little bit of his surreal, absurdist crap floating around in the fantasy games I've run.
5. Clash of the Titans - Who wouldn't want to wear a helm of invisibility and ride around on Pegasus?
We must be about the same age! Groo, D'Aulaire's Greek (and Norse) Myths, and Time Bandits were all very influential. I haven't even thought about Groo (and what Groo does best!) in decades.
 
My fantasy Appendix N, I'll have to divide into books and film/TV, so I'll start with the latter, because I honestly don't even now where to begin with the former...

1. The Jim Henson Fantasies

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2. The Last Unicorn

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3. Dragonslayer

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4. Ladyhawke


04.jpg

5. Legend

05.jpg

6. 80's Barbarian Films

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7. Robin of Sherwood

08.jpg

8. Ray Harryhausen Films

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9. Saturday Morning Cartoons

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10. The Legend of Zelda


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For SciFi:
Alien, Outland and various "tech manuals" had a big effect on me. By tech manuals I mean the Colonial Marines ones or the confederation handbook for Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy which I tended to enjoy more than the actual novels themselves. I read the Star Wars ones years before I ever saw Star Wars.

This created an early love for "workman" or technical SciFi that was grounded in the main, but with maybe some fantastical element on the edges, i.e. the Alien itself, the existence of ghosts, hell.

peter-hamilton-confederation-handbook_360_a84142465b4c347573eb63b261703d92.jpg

Fantasy:
I read very little Fantasy when I was younger. The biggest influence here are my grandmother telling my sister and me stories about the Sidhe when we were young. The style of those stories would be a big part of my basic idea of fantasy. On top of this also the stories of Roald Dahl in things like "The Witches" and the small selection of Terry Pratchett we had in the school library, especially the Nome Trilogy.

I had little fantasy beyond this as a child so the next real massive influence on me was when I started reading up on D&D and the OSR there only four years ago where upon I found Jack Vance, who really wrote truly "fantastical" in the medieval sense stories and Lyonesse reminds me of granny's stories.

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The entire Conan the Barbarian franchise, but first and foremost that original stories by Robert E. Howard. Extra credit for the Marvel and/or Dark Horse comics, which are surprisingly faithful. Howard's Conan and his Hyborian Age are a lot richer and more nuanced than most people have ever given him credit for.

Edgar Rich Burroughs' entire body of work, though especially the Barsoom (obviously) and Pellucidar series. Burroughs' Mars is a lot closer to what I want a "fantasy world" to look like than Tolkien's Middle Earth, and what I want D&D to reflect: stranger, and if the world is anthropocentric (which I prefer!) I want that which is not human to be more inhuman than the standard "Tolkien Trio" races.

Lin Carter's Thongor of Lemuria series. In the very first novel, when our barbarian hero realizes that his captor's stable of riding dinosaurs is too heavily guarded, he steals the man's wind-up airship instead.

Journey to the West forms the basis of a whole hell of a lot of other properties that I would otherwise put on this list. This really marks a lot of what I want my fantasy protagonists and my D&D player characters to feel like, the more mythic feeling that high-level characters (IMO) should exhibit. Plus, the Chinese folk cosmology is a lot more comfortable for me than a lot of the implications of the Great Wheel, especially pertaining to "The Gods" and their place in the Multiverse.

Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher series-- while the games are far more popular, I'm basically incapable of playing them, so I ended up getting into the Netflix series and the original novels instead. And I can vouch for them, because the dark fairy tale vibe meshes seamlessly with the sword & sorcery vibe, and serves as the perfect bridge between Howard's Hyborian Age and Miyamoto's Mushroom Kingdom.

Now, lest we give Dear Reader the mistaken impression that I am, despite first impressions, literate:

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, in all of its incarnations-- yes, including the 1987 Masters of the Universe film, yes inlcuding the 1991 New Adventures of He-Man, but most especially including the most recent run of DC Comics by Tim Seeley, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix. Again, a wild and wonderful world that looks like nothing from Earth's history, a great variety of decidedly inhuman peoples and creatures, and an expectation that the real movers and shakers of the setting are well beyond mere mortals.

The entire Super Mario Bros franchise, but most especially the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi roleplaying games. Again with a much deeper fairy tale vibe than most casual fans recognize, again with a more vibrant and wondrous magical world than just medieval Europe with a coat of magic paint, again with mythic heroes beyond the capabilities of mere mortal men.
 
Hmm, a list of 10 things eh? OK, here we go in no particular order, but in two categories:

Category the First, in which we examine ancient history:

1. The Lord of the Rings. 'Nuff said.
2. Fire and Ice, an animated film by Ralph Bakshi
3. Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King
4. The first two Shanarra books by Terry Brooks
5. The marvelous boxed set of Mr. Moldvay

Category the Second, in which we examine more recent touchstones:

1. Joe Abercrombie, the collected works
2. David Gemmell, the collected works
3. Scott Lynch, The Gentlemen Bastards
4. Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files
5. Small press indie publishers in general, but specifically Vincent Baker and John Harper, for showing me it could be done differently
 
Fantasy highlights then not in order, just how quickly I remembered them.
1. Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion
2. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams
3. Elric/Eternal Champion series (most)
4. Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy
5. David Weber's War God's Own series
6. Last Unicorn
7. Beowulf
8. Mabinogion
9. Folklore/Myth (From around the world)
10. Poul Anderson's Works

But that's a speck of all I've read, enjoyed, and was inspired by.

Science Fiction
1. Poul Anderson.
2. James White/Sector General
3. H. Beam Piper.
4. Quantum Theif series
6. Lensmen Chronicles
7. Dr. Who (Many)
8. Keith Laumer Retief
9. Elizabeth Moon's SF
10. Stainless Steel Rat.

I'll be back with Urban/Rural modern fantasy later.


10.
 
I can look at everything on this list and note it's influence on both my approach to running Supers campaigns, and designing Phaserip.

But it is a bit frustrating trying to limit it to ten (even if I crammed as much as possible into each of those slots), so here is a not-even-close-to-comprehensive list of runner ups:

All-Star Superman, Astro City, Batman (The Dennis O'Neil Run), Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman: The Long Halloween, Daredevil (The Bendis Run), Daredevil: Man Without Fear, DC: The New Frontier, Deadpool (The Joe Kelly Run), Incredible Hulk (The Peter David Run), Fantastic Four (The Waid/Weiringo Run), JLA: Year One, One Punch Man, Planetary, Promethea, Sandman Mystery Theatre, Spectacular Spider-man (The Gerry Conway/ Sal Buscema Run), Spider-man 2099, Starman, Superman & Batman: World's Finest (by Steve Rude), Top Ten, Uncanny X-Men (The Claremont Run), Warlock (The Jim Starlin run), Wolverine ( The Larry Hama Run)


Really great list! I approve!
 
Science Fiction is a weird one for me. I've seen hundreds of scifi films, and while I've variously enjoyed many of them it's hard for me to say that they were an influence on me overall. Ditto numerous SciFi paperbacks I devoured in my adolescence, when you could rarely find me without a book on the go. While many were enjoyable enough, few of them made a lasting impression on me. Part of the issue is that SciFi simply doesn't "push my buttons" in the same way fantasy does. I like it, but I'm not in love with it - or rather, it's rare that I want to slip into, or immerse myself in it. That said, here are the ten that probably left the deepest impact on me in regards to my formative tastes growing up.

1. The Prisoner

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2. Dune

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3. Phillip K. Dick

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4. Terran Trade Authority/Cosmic Encounters

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5. The Hyperion Cantos

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6. Galaxy High

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7. Doctor Who

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8. Robocop

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9. Infra-man

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10. Classic Anime

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