Appendix W

14 Sep, 2025

Trauma is a funny thing. I wasn't a person until a few years ago. Before that, I lived lives that I only half-remember, glimpsed through an underlying cloud of pain and regret. When I went back to reconstruct my influences for this post, it felt like archeology. It was frustrating. Almost all the works that immediately came to mind were so recent for me. The rest are buried. I was working with scraps, fragments, secondary sources put together years after the events occurred. I keep thinking there must be more here, there must be something underneath. I can see its effects, I can see how it filtered down through time to where I am now. But the sources and context are lost. Maybe someday I'll unearth an ancient trove and finally put the mystery to rest. Maybe I'll never know.

Anyways, because I am constitutionally incapable of participating in popular things while they are at their most popular, here is my appendix N, a list of influences for my TTRPGs.

Books and Stories

• Tarma and Kethry stories: Just two gals being pals. Though they came well after the heyday of pulp (but right on time for the 80s fantasy boom,) the Vows and Honor series are probably my favorite pulp I've read.¹ Each short story and novella is a solid episode of adventuring, usually with a bit of underlying commentary. Tarma and Kethry are my templates for good adventurers. They are world-weary, though not overly cynical. They are pragmatic, but with a sense of duty. Most of all, they are loyal to each other, and their bond is their strength.
• That Insidious Beast: I love the presentation of this piece. The epistolary style, written as documents from a world different from ours, opened my mind to how narrative could be communicated. In-universe documentation can be so informative and narratively rich. I don't do handouts as much as I'd like, but I attribute the ones I do to this. It also captured the time period: a poisoned world, a morally bankrupt isolated superpower caught in an endless quagmire of its own making, religious zealotry sacrificing humanity to satisfy the whims of alien visitors. My worlds often have an element of post-apocalypse or pre-apocalypse; either the end has happened or the end is in sight. This work is one of my major inspirations for the latter. Yet despite the dire circumstances, so much of the actual narrative is about the normal people just trying to get by. In the midst of horror and despair, I like to see how people persist, find joy, find meaning, and maybe make things a little bit better, even for just a moment.
• Laird Barron stories: I like Laird Barron's horror stories in and of themselves. However, underlying most of them is a Hungry Cosmos, a mythos of entities and people that crisscross his many short stories and a few of his novels. I slowly built a web of connections as I read, finding little nods here and there that formed a shape in my mind. But the center of that shape, the area outlined by everything else, the meaning and the source, remained empty. It could not be filled in (nor would I want it to be.) My mind kept coming back to that void. There was something electrifying in that unknown center. There was something terrifying in having enough understanding that you know the shape of the truth but being unable to do anything but stare at that central emptiness. I love cosmic horror mythoi and there's plenty of other examples out there, but when I think about how I want to implement cosmic horror in my games and other works, Laird Barron's model is what I return to.
• Earthsea stories: I think LeGuin reset my understanding of fantasy. I know before I read this, I had been obsessed with modern-ish and very historical settings. My fantasy was strictly urban. LeGuin helped me understand the appeal of the second-world fantasy. The journey through it was filled with introspection and empathy - it was the first time that I was actually convinced that magic could be based on the practitioner's' will and character; every time I had seen it before then, it felt hollow.
• Rev. Awdry's Railway Series: I like trains. I fell in love with them as a kid and it never left me. When I was a child, my family had a gigantic, illustrated Railway Series collection. I still have a handful of memories of reading it. I had a whole slew of train books and stories when I was a kid, though I can't remember them all. For a kid who had the misfortune of growing up in a car-culture suburb, trains were as fantastical as any foreign landscape or exotic animal. This affinity seeped into my work. Of course, I like to include trains wherever appropriate. Beyond that, I like thinking about how people travel, the infrastructure needed to support them, and the ways that transportation can bring communities together. Technological development plays a large role in this, and simply connecting people can reshape landscapes and communities. I also think that trains are one of those objects (like ships) that are easy to anthropomorphize, and so make great elements to give players.

Movies and Shows

• Star Wars (Original Trilogy): When I was a very young child, I loudly declared that I hated Star Wars.² My exposure was through other children at school and daycare, and it seemed like it was nothing more than the same aggressive, sugared up nonsensical crashing and screaming matches that seemed to be the boys' only interests.³ My parents decided they needed to remedy this before I became socially isolated, and sat me down to watch the first three Star Wars movies. It was a transformative experience for young me. I hadn't seen movies like that before. They were different in a way that captured my imagination. The movies brought me wonder, they promised that the world was bigger than my tiny nowhere town, maybe even bigger than I could imagine. Everything I do since then, I think, has carried a shard of that initial wonder. I want to evoke the sense of endless possibility, that what you see right now is just a fraction of what could be out there, that the universe is wider than you can imagine; and for whatever terrible things might be lurking out there, there is also friendship, courage, and hope. I also want to capture that sense of the tangible fantastic. Something about the sets and the costumes and the tiny models felt so tangible to my young mind. I can enjoy impossible things, but left to my own devices, I want to describe fantastical creatures, items, and places in such a way that they feel like you could reach out and grab them.
• Venture Brothers: The Venture Brothers altered my speech patterns. I've never seen a show grow so much over the course of its run. Everyone says a big theme of the show is failure, and that's somewhat true, but what I took away is that it's all just people. It's people all the way down, and people are disappointing, fallible, irrational, self-interested, and very very occasionally capable of doing the right thing. The presentation of an archetypical character, followed by breaking their mask and showing the actual person inside, is something that I like to employ to build depth in characters. Plus it's the only "what if superheroes were in the real world" show that's actually good. I liked the way it wove the ridiculous comic book events into real history, something that appeals to my urban fantasy sensibilities.
• Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job: T&E also altered my speech patterns. T&E's style of humor is hard to describe succinctly. I could say it's disgusting, it's crass, it's random, it's barely meaningful, it's stoner comedy at its stoneriest, but that doesn't capture the full picture, and that doesn't really matter to me. I am attracted to T&E for its sense of frenetic unreality, the juxtaposition of mundane with the impossible, and the pervasive honest unvarnished grodiness in so many of its sketches. I like its presentation of hyperreality, of a hollow world so drenched in signifiers that the signified disappears. I think in some ways they were ahead of their time, even though watching it now makes me nostalgic for the early 2000s. There is a sort of madness that comes with living, working, and thriving in the late capitalist universe; T&E may not have been the most astute commenters on the phenomenon but they certainly are the funniest. My imagined technological dystopias, no matter how distant in time, always have a streak of this madness.
• The Music Man: If you must pick a film version, then of course the 1962 version with Robert Preston.⁴ I'm a red-blooded American, and like any red-blooded American I am enchanted by hucksters and con artists. There is a very particularly American romanticism for the showman who lives by his wits at the expense of others; in the Music Man, he happens to be redeemed. Robert Preston's performance is my template for every character who gets by on trickery, for good or ill. The Music Man hits the right notes to make him both clearly an immoral person, yet likeable and charming enough for us to forgive him. His particular combination of bastardry and charm is something I love to build into minor villains or major NPCs.⁵

Video Games

• Deus Ex: I can hear it still. Deus Ex has three thing going for it: its expansive gameplay, its levels, and the depth of its setting background.⁶ The gameplay and levels of Deus Ex have been written about at length so I won't repeat it here, but just state that I love providing open worlds to explore. I love the tightness of the levels, the claustrophobic navigation, and the interactable elements. I don't typically map out spaces, but when I do, I like to make them full of small rooms and twisting passages, with lots of things that can be broken, moved, activated, exploded, or exploited.
  Deus Ex also was the first game I played that actually cared about ideology enough to interrogate it. As an adult looking back, much of it is surface-level, but it was still miles ahead of other games. I think Deus Ex's approach is best exemplified by two events: the conversation with Morpheus, and the ending choice. Most of the time when a game asks you to choose an end for the game it's silly and inconsequential, a last second bone tossed to trick you into feeling like you made an impact. However, Deus Ex's endings are built up throughout the entire game, and more importantly, each one points to a meaningful difference in the values of the player. You are about to gain immense power, and each faction (Tracer Tong, Morgan Everett, and Helios) has a vision for how you should (not could, should) use that power to shape the world. The entire game, you've been listening to them explain why their vision is the only good future. However, each of them also has self-serving reasons for wanting their particular vision realized, and characters will point out the obvious flaws in each one. It is up to the player to decide what they value most, what sacrifices are worth making and what consequences are worth accepting.
  This is basically my template for coming up with factions. Most factions form because they have a shared vision of how they want to use power, and will work towards it. No faction is purely good, all of them are trying to navigate an uncertain world. Every faction's goal has benefits, yes, and may even be laudable, but all will come with downsides. Players aligning with a faction means, inevitably, that they are supporting that faction's goals, and their choice of faction will reflect their values.
• Victoria 2:⁷ I played way too much of this game when I was younger. It infected me with an interest in the 19th century, especially the experience of people outside of Europe and North America. It inspired me to learn world history, politics, and economics. The nineteenth century and its various national, political, and economic conflicts inspired the groups and conflicts I use to populate my own settings. Vicky 2 is also mostly a political and economic game. The main gameplay is guiding your chosen nation through the Industrial Revolution, imperialism, and multiple ages of revolution. Notably, in a genre that's obsessed with state warfare, Vicky 2 had a great deal of focus on internal development and politics, of balancing interest groups and trying to steer factions to achieve results. It is a major influence on what I like to focus on in domain play: economic development, faction interplay, and ideological conflict.
• Fallout: New Vegas: Yeah, yeah, I know, but it remains a classic for a reason. It's far from perfect, but I like its post-post-apocalypse. Everything has a sense of dynamic history to it. Things happened before Courier Six woke up in Goodsprings, and you find evidence and consequences of these events throughout the game. It invests the world with power and resonance. Some games and settings feel static, like each point existed in the way you found it forever up until your character arrives. There are bits of FNV that do feel like this, but it is often so much richer than that. I try to invest all of my settings with dynamic history, with changes and progress that leaves marks on the world for players to discover. I try to weave connections between points of interest and the major factions, so that idly nothing feels like a secluded island (unless it's meant to.)
• Neo Wolfenstein: New Order, Old Blood, New Colossus.⁸ From the minute you start in the plane above the Baltic, Wolfenstein delivers intense action. I still am trying to figure out a way to translate the full experience into an RPG game; my attempts have not quite worked, but I'll keep trying. In the meantime, I was inspired to keep combats fast, and make use of weak but numerous enemies. The aesthetics of the Nazi state in Wolfenstein also influenced the aesthetics of my evil, authoritarian factions. The Nazi buildings are grandiose but inhuman. They are intimidating at a distance, but up close they inevitably have rotting hearts. Their soldiers are over-armored and masked. All their machines resemble feral beasts, ogres, or skeletons. It's obviously not necessarily realistic, but for factions that are meant to represent the worst of humanity, it is good to dress them in a way that reflects their contempt for mankind and worship of death.

TTRPGS

• Fantasy Flight Games's Rogue Trader: It's janky, overcomplicated, and badly organized, but it was my first ever RPG, and you never forget your first. I think in some ways every single RPG that I've run since has been trying to recapture the feeling of my first Rogue Trader games. It's a game of contrasts. The universe is dark, gothic, and vast. It is set on the fringe of a decaying, inhumanly large empire. Yet, you are the people allowed and encouraged to travel outside of it. You have permission to cross those vast distances, and explore whatever you find there. The characters need not be archetypes, but they are always larger-than-life. In a setting bound up in themes of servitude, obligation, and crushing duty, you are moral agents, free to make decisions not just in pragmatic matters, but in what you value. I also like Rogue Trader's specific handling of space, a neat middle ground between the pure fantasy of Star Wars, the handwaving of Star Trek, and much harder sci-fi. There is enough real-life astronomy to make it interesting, but no so much that it dominates the game. My current space games tend to lean a little harder, but not by much.

What I Can't Remember

I provide the following as illustration. I love doomed last stands and heroic fighting retreats. I love the image of fighting a force far greater than yours, knowing you can't hold the ground, and either fighting as long as you can or escaping to save as many people as possible. I try to work it into almost all the games I run, and many of my one-shot scenarios are about overwhelmed forces trying to achieve something less than total victory.

I have no idea why. It's romantic, certainly, and plenty dramatic. Nothing brings out one's character like knowing failure is certain. Yet there's nothing in particular that I can point to as its origin. Maybe ESB's Hoth sequence was responsible for it? Maybe not, those weren't the emotions I took away from it, there was too much focus on the individual journeys. Maybe it was that single clip of The Four Feathers where a British square gets obliterated by Madhists that my grandfather showed me? Maybe. I have some vague and some specific recollections of RTS levels that involve delaying actions against superior forces. Certainly this is something that appears a lot in fiction, but did I get it from one particular work or set of works, or did it evolve naturally over time? I'm just not sure.

Maybe that's normal. Maybe an Appendix N, with its neat list of distinct works, can never actually capture your true influences, because what we bring to the table is not a sterile extract from the things we've watched, read, and played. Inside our mind, we mix in our life experiences, our history, and our values. Sometimes the thing that comes out the other end is so personal and unique that it hardly bears a resemblance to the source at all, though the line of connection still exists. Maybe everyone already knows this, and so I've missed the point of this exercise entirely.

#not-rpg