Table 46

Jewelsea RPG - Inspirational and Educational Reading

It's time for another Blog Bandwagon - this time we're talking about our own personal Appendix N. For those who might not be aware, Appendix N was the 14th appendix of the 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In it, Gary Gygax listed a number of books and authors he recommended for dungeon masters to understand the mood that AD&D was trying to achieve and the fiction it was trying to emulate. In this post, I'll be listing some of the same things for both my Jewelsea setting and the associated game I'm working on. I won't be restricting myself to only books, however.

Roleplaying Games

Dungeons & Dragons

What else is there to say? The hobby wouldn't exist as it does today without D&D. I love playing a character seeking fortune in a hole in the ground. Gygax and Arneson hit on a winning formula here. My work is mostly inspired by the '70s and '80s versions of the game, but I'm also a big fan of 4th Edition.

Torchbearer

Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane's love letter to the 1980-81 Basic and Expert sets, Torchbearer is the game that first brought me into OSR adjacent spaces. I love the way in makes characters rigorously manage inventory space, resources, and their condition to make sure they have enough treasure to pay the bills they accrue in town to recover from what they went through to get said treasure.

Apocalypse World

Vincent and Meguey Baker's post-apocalyptic mashup. This game taught me a lot about how roleplaying games actually work. I ran into it early in my hobby and it unlocked ways of thinking about games that I would never have come up with on my own. Though I came in around the same time the Forge shut down, I ended up regularly attending Forge Midwest in part because of this game. It's still the con I look forward to the most every year.

Ultraviolet Grasslands

Luka Rejec did a fantastic job setting a weird mood here. Though the Jewelsea isn't the same kind of surreal fantasy as UVG, this book is full of art and tables that spark the imagination and is a great example of how to build a sandbox.

RuneQuest

The Jewelsea was born in large part out of my frustration with the current direction of RuneQuest. Glorantha is my favorite published setting for RPGs, but I came in with the Guide to Glorantha and Heroquest Glorantha. This gave me a somewhat skewed perspective on exactly what the setting was - these products focused a lot less on Sartar and Prax than most of the other published things out there. I'm largely uninterested in the Sartarites vs. Lunars through line that dominates most of the recent published material, so I decided to make my own setting that draws much of its inspiration from ancient history in the same way that Glorantha draws from ancient myth.

Video Games

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Wow - I ran into this one as an impressionable 14-year-old and it left an indelible mark. The striking visuals and unusual environments amazed me, and the weird architecture and even stranger people kept me hooked. Mushroom forests! Meteors suspended in midair! A religion built on one big lie! As an adult, I can see that these aren't entirely new ideas, but they were still executed with admirable panache.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom

These aren't actually my favorite Zelda games (I love solving puzzles in dungeons too much), but they are the games that most directly convey the feeling that I want players to have as they explore the Jewelsea. There's ruins everywhere, something interesting to investigate almost always within sight, and the freedom to approach challenges in multitudinous different ways.

Europa Universalis IV & Imperator: Rome

I got into Paradox games about five years ago because some of the other players in one of my campaigns were regularly talking about them. They quickly hooked me. These two are my favorites and they keep me thinking about the layered complexity of places - the boundaries of culture, religion, trade, and resource production don't neatly stack on one other. Instead, they overlap in ways that cause interesting conflicts and push everyone to interact with one another.

TV

Dungeon Meshi

This is a delightful look at a lot of the practicalities involved in dungeon delving, as well as an interesting story as well. I've held off on reading the manga until I can finish the story with the second season of the show, but I'm looking forward to it whenever it happens.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

I like the way the show depicts journeys and the passage of time - two things that I want to emphasize as the world of the Jewelsea grows and changes along with the players.

The Wheel of Time

While the show itself was uneven, the costuming in this show was impeccable. I think about it a lot when I'm visualizing what the people of the Jewelsea look like. It's a shame that it was cancelled.

Film

Star Wars

There are few things drilled deeper into my psyche than the original trilogy, which I was first introduced to approximately age 7 after I wanted more science fiction following the finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's an influence on pretty much any creative project - how could it not be when I came home from school and watched one of the movies almost every day for months?

Indiana Jones

What can I say - George Lucas has a hold on me! So many of the scenes in the various tombs, temples, and other locations inspire what dungeon crawling and exploration should look like.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

I had tried to read Lord of the Rings several times in middle school, but bounced off of it each time. When the movies came out, I finally got it and quickly devoured both Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. These have some great visual designs, though I'll give credit for most of the theme to Tolkien.

Fiction

Earthsea

I'm a big fan of all of Ursula K. LeGuin's work, but for obvious reasons, Earthsea is a big inspiration for the Jewelsea. As originally conceived, the setting was just the archipelago and bore more than a little similarity to Earthsea, but it's grown in the telling to cover the nearby bits of continents. I've also always liked Earthsea's depiction of magic, though it only inspires in terms of theme rather than mechanics for my game.

Arabian Nights & The Seven Voyages of Sindbad

I read through these a few years ago and they're chock full of interesting imagery and cool ideas. Tales of great adventures are great for chopping up and sticking in the world for players to run into.

The Lord of the Rings

Two and a half decades after I finally made my way through the trilogy, I'm still in awe of Tolkien's worldbuilding. When I continued on to the Silmarillion, I was even more impressed. These are the books that taught me that secondary creation, to use Tolkien's words, was something that could be more than just daydreaming.

Elric

Moorcock's brooding albino sorcerer might be my favorite character from the first three quarters of the twentieth century. I've been slowly working my way through the original Appendix N over the last decade or so, and the dying empire of Melniboné, the city of Tanelorn, and the great conflict of Law and Chaos left an impression on me.

Conan

I've only gotten around to reading the Conan stories in recent months, but it's full of lots of useful ideas and imagery for adventure fantasy. I can see why Gygax included it in the DMG.

Non-Fiction

Weapons, Warriors, & Battles of Ancient Iberia - Fernando Quesada-Sanz

This is a great book full of illustrations and photographs of the kit that Iberian and Celtiberian warriors used in their wars with Carthage and Rome, along with explanations of the culture and military systems that produced them.

Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean - Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

This one explores how trade leads to the spreading of culture across a large area and how economics link together even places thousands of kilometers apart.

The Storm Before the Storm - Mike Duncan

This is a look at when the wheels began to come off the Roman Republic - the period between 146 BCE and 78 BCE, from the final fall of Carthage and Corinth to the victory of Sulla in the civil war. The mix of ambition and total inability of Rome's existing systems to restrain it as the empire it built flooded the metropole with plunder is a big inspiration when it comes to the politics of the Jewelsea.

In Search of the Phoenicians - Josephine Quinn

This one is about how the Phoenicians never saw themselves as such until well after what most people today think of as Phoenicians were debris in the dustbin of history. It's an interesting look at how culture and ethnicity form in the ancient world.

Podcasts

The History of Rome - Mike Duncan

It's almost impossible to make anything inspired by the ancient world without being overwhelmed by Rome. I've tried to avoid making this inspiration too central, but Duncan's podcast is an early classic in the art form. It sometimes sticks a little too close to the narrative, eliding exactly how and why things are happening, but it's a rip-roaring story all the way through.

History of Persia - Trevor Culley

The empires of Persia through antiquity, from the Achaemenids to the Sassanids, are a major influence on the Jewelsea. I knew embarrassingly little about Persia prior to diving into this podcast - they were mostly the villains in stories about Greece or Rome. Now, their culture, religion, and politics have clued me in to possibilities I wasn't aware of before.

History of Egypt - Dominic Perry

Covering the topic in such exhausting detail that even after a decade the podcast hasn't reached the first millennium BCE, this one is full of information not only about what happened in ancient Egypt, but also how and why their society functioned the way it did. Even though it's a bit outside of the time period that my primary inspiration comes from, there's so much useful stuff in here.

Revolutions - Mike Duncan

Duncan surpasses his work on History of Rome in this podcast about revolutions from the 17th century to the 20th century. He goes into detail on the politics and philosophy behind the revolutions - useful for understanding the pressures put on people in politics and the interaction of republican and monarchic thought, something very relevant in the ancient world.

The Oldest Stories - James Bleckley

A look at the history and myth of Mesopotamia and the Levant, starting from the early Bronze Age. There's a lot of good information in this one about both how ancient religions worked and the mechanics of early empires.

Blogs

There are far too many of these to list in detail, but a non-exhaustive list of blogs whose work I've found useful

I do want to give special attention to Bret Devereaux's A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. It's been going for six years now with weekly posts, only rarely missing a week, and it's one of the most accessible starting points for getting into ancient history I can think of. The posts examining how modern media depicts the past, whether in film, TV, or video games, are excellent and the primers on how facets of pre-modern society worked are fantastic. I largely credit it with rekindling my passion for history after it had laid largely dormant for much of the previous decade.

Conclusion

Well, this has gone on for quite a while. One of the things I'm looking to get more of as I move on is history on the Indian Ocean in antiquity - most of the material that I have right now is very Mediterranean focused - only when the Persians or Hellenistic Greeks venture east do I get much of a picture of India, the Horn of Africa, or the lands beyond. I'd love to make my setting less Eurocentric, so I'm actively seeking more history in those places. I hope you enjoyed learning about my inspirations!