What is this Appendix N thing?

1 answer

1. 0 scoreAccepted

   Appendix N is the list of "Inspirational and Educational Reading" Gary Gygax included on page 224 of the 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, naming the authors and works he credited as the primary literary influences on D&D. Gygax opens with a brief autobiographical preamble crediting his father's bedtime stories of "cloaked old men who could grant wishes, of magic rings and enchanted swords, of wicked sorcerors and dauntless swordsmen," along with EC comics, science fiction and horror movies, the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang's fairy tales, and a lifetime of reading SF and fantasy since 1950 — then offers the list itself as the authors of "particular inspiration" to him.

   The roster is heavy on pulp-era and mid-century fantasy and sword-and-sorcery: Poul Anderson (Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword, The High Crusade), John Bellairs (The Face in the Frost), Leigh Brackett, Fredric Brown, Edgar Rice Burroughs (Pellucidar, Mars, and Venus series), Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp (Lest Darkness Fall, The Fallible Fiend) and de Camp & Pratt's Harold Shea stories, August Derleth, Lord Dunsany, Philip José Farmer (World of the Tiers), Gardner Fox (Kothar, Kyrik), Robert E. Howard (Conan), Sterling Lanier (Hiero's Journey), Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd & Gray Mouser), H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt (Creep, Shadow, Creep, Moon Pool, Dwellers in the Mirage), Michael Moorcock (Stormbringer, Stealer of Souls, Hawkmoon — "esp. the first three books"), Andre Norton, Andrew J. Offutt as editor of Swords Against Darkness III, Fletcher Pratt (Blue Star), Fred Saberhagen (Changeling Earth), Margaret St. Clair (The Shadow People, Sign of the Labrys), Tolkien (The Hobbit and "Ring Trilogy"), Jack Vance (The Eyes of the Overworld, The Dying Earth), Stanley Weinbaum, Manly Wade Wellman, Jack Williamson, and Roger Zelazny (Jack of Shadows, Amber). Crucially, Gygax closes with his own ranked verdict: "The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt" — a much shorter inner circle than the full list, and notably one that places Tolkien outside the top tier despite his outsized later reputation in the hobby. The significance of Appendix N is both mechanical and cultural. Mechanically, you can trace specific D&D systems back to specific entries: Vance's Dying Earth magic explains memorize-cast-forget spellcasting (the "Vancian" system); Leiber's pairing supplies the fighter/thief archetype; Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions contributes the regenerating troll, the paladin class, and an early Law-vs-Chaos cosmology that Moorcock's Elric and Hawkmoon books then sharpened into D&D's alignment axis; de Camp & Pratt's Harold Shea stories — where a modern protagonist is transported into rule-bound fantasy worlds and has to reason about their logic — arguably model the player-character stance itself. Culturally, the OSR adopted "Appendix N" as shorthand for a specific aesthetic — weird, morally ambiguous, low-magic-but-high-strangeness picaresque — and as a deliberate counterweight to the Tolkien-and-Forgotten-Realms high fantasy that came to dominate later editions. Jeffro Johnson's blog series and subsequent book Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons did much to popularize this re-reading in the 2010s, treating the list as a recoverable lost canon rather than a quaint bibliography. It's worth noting a few absences too: no Ursula K. Le Guin, no Mervyn Peake, no E.R. Eddison, and — for a list compiled in 1979 — no women beyond Brackett, Norton, and St. Clair, which has prompted decades of "Appendix N expansion" projects from various corners of the hobby.

Sign in to post an answer.