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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

15 Things That Influenced Your Campaign?


I was about to be a cranky contrarian and post the 15 games that had NO influence on me, but it would also make me a hypocrite since I already caught the wave over at someone else's blog.
So how about something a little different. What were the top 15 things that went into the intellectual stew of your campaign (actual existing or the Platonic Ideal one you are cooking)?
Hill Cantons:
  1. Lyonesse and Dying Earth books, Jack Vance
  2. Gray Mouser and Fafhrd stories, Fritz Leiber
  3. Darklands CRPG
  4. West Marches campaign
  5. The Hussite Wars (book, but also all medieval European heretical movements in general)
  6. Averoigne stories , Clark Ashton Smith
  7. "Shadow over Innsmouth" (and the rest to a lesser extent), HP Lovecraft
  8. Barsoom books (an influence starting to make itself known), Edgar Rice Burroughs
  9. Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and Blood Meridian
  10. Russian and other Slavic fairy tales
  11. The Thirty Years War, CV Wedgwood
  12. "Red Nails" (and other Conan to a lesser extent), R.E. Howard
  13. The players (probably should be on everyone's list as a reminder)

2 comments:

  1. I've heard a lot about Darklands but I never played it myself. I'm curious what you took from it.

    I tossed up 13 of my own a while back, though I took longer than 15 minutes to write it all up.

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  2. @Darklands scratched a number of itches for me after coming back stateside from Slovakia. The game was designed by an avid wargamer Arnold Hendricks, the same author who put together Knights and Magick, an early 80s five-book set of medieval fantasy miniature rules dripping with detail and flavor.

    It had the moody gothic feel of medieval central Europe in spades with an undertone of the weird like riding into a typical-looking visit only to find out that the local peasants had some peculiar sabbath rituals--or suddenly bumping into the Wild Hunt while trying to take a shortcut through a forest. The game was also very non-linear, a huge sandbox on a map that felt quite large for that generation of games.

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