Appendix N

• 1. The Reading List

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  Appendix N grew partly from a deal. Jack Vance allowed Gary Gygax to use his Ioun Stones as a magical item in Dungeons and Dragons. The condition was that Vance's books would be credited on the game's official reading list. They were.

  That list appeared in the 1979 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide under the heading "Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading." It names 28 authors, 22 specific books, and 12 different series. Gygax described it as the source of many concepts, tropes, spells, and monsters used in developing D&D.

  Most of the work on the list had reached readers first as serials in pulp magazines during the 1930s. These were genres that existed well before fantasy became a global mass media phenomenon. Gygax was pointing players backward, toward a literary tradition that most of his 1979 audience had never read. How much of D&D was really borrowed? And what happened when some of Gygax's sources had something to say about it?

  When the 5th Edition Player's Handbook arrived in 2014, it published its own updated reading list under the title "Appendix E: Inspirational Reading."

• 2. The Pulp Inheritance

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  Lord Dunsany, Leigh Brackett, and August Derleth appear alongside Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs's entry alone spans three separate series: Barsoom, Pellucidar, and Venus. These authors worked in forms Gygax described as planetary romance and weird fiction. Both terms name modes of storytelling that had become obsolete genres by 1979.

  Fritz Leiber is listed for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. Roger Zelazny appears for the Amber series. Philip Jose Farmer appears for The World of the Tiers series. Gardner Fox is listed for both the Kothar and Kyrik series. Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon series is included, with a note recommending the first three books in particular.

  A. Merritt's entry names works including The Moon Pool and Dwellers in the Mirage. Clark Ashton Smith was absent from the original list, an omission Gygax later addressed. Works cited but not formally listed include EC Comics, medieval bestiaries, and fairy tales. Many entries carry the notation "et al.," meaning an author's further writing beyond the named titles was considered part of the source material.

  Poul Anderson appears for three specific books: Three Hearts and Three Lions, The High Crusade, and The Broken Sword. Andrew J. Offutt appears not as an author but as the editor of Swords Against Darkness III, the Appendix's one editorial credit.

• 3. Rules from Stories

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  Gary Gygax named six authors as the deepest influences on D&D. They were L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt. These six were placed above the rest of the list.

  D&D's alignment system, the division of all characters and creatures into Law or Chaos, came from Michael Moorcock's Elric stories. Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions also shaped the same concept, and that novel directly inspired the Paladin player character class.

  Robert E. Howard's Conan stories stand behind the Barbarian class, though debate continues among fans over how to characterize Conan. Some read him as a fighter, others as a thief, others as a hybrid. The dungeon structure itself, especially the concept of multiple levels connected by secret doors, came from Margaret St. Clair. Her novel Sign of the Labrys was the key source. The Drow and the Underdark drew from both A. Merritt and St. Clair.

  Jack Vance's approach to magic became so central to D&D that the system bears his name. The method by which magic-users memorize spells and lose them upon casting is now called the Vancian magic system. Vance also inspired the Thief player class and several early spells. Gygax stated publicly that D&D was not meant to recreate the work of any single author on the list. That claim would soon meet its most famous test.

• 4. Tolkien and the Law

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  Gygax described J.R.R. Tolkien's impact on D&D as "minimal" and called the Ring Trilogy "tedious." The game itself told a different story. The Halfling character race was originally called the Hobbit. The Ranger class was modeled after Aragorn. The division of elves and the prevalence of orcs both trace directly back to Tolkien.

  Tolkien does appear in Appendix N, listed for The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Gygax did not identify him as one of the key influences. That public stance would not protect TSR in court. Elan Merchandising served TSR with papers on behalf of the Tolkien Estate, threatening half a million dollars in damages. The complaint named both D&D and a Five Armies game. TSR was told to remove Balrog, Dragon, Dwarf, Elf, Ent, Goblin, Hobbit, Orc, and Warg from the game. Eventually most were ruled to be in the public domain. The exceptions were Hobbit, Ent, and Balrog.

  Tolkien's was not the only estate to assert rights. The first edition of the Deities and Demigods reference book included statistics for characters from the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. The Melnibonean mythos of Michael Moorcock was also represented. Both became subjects of legal threats and were removed from later editions of the book. In the aftermath of these cases, few classic D&D monsters were ever claimed as Product Identity by Wizards of the Coast. The Beholder and the Mind Flayer are the notable exceptions.

• 5. The Old School Renaissance

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  Joseph Goodman read every book in Appendix N to create Dungeon Crawl Classics, a roleplaying game directly inspired by Gygax's aesthetic. Many of its published modules reference specific Appendix N texts. Peril on the Purple Planet takes its inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Campaign settings based on the worlds of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance have also been published.

  Dungeon Crawl Classics became part of a broader movement called the OSR, the Old School Renaissance. This was a wave of roleplaying games returning to the sources that Appendix N had documented. Michael Moorcock identified the late 1970s creation of D&D as the beginning of a genuinely new genre of fantasy.

  Jeffro Johnson's book on his journey through Appendix N was nominated for the Hugo Award in 2016. In 2022, Ernie Gygax Jr. nominated Shagduk by J.B. Jackson as an honorary Appendix N title. Games designer Martin Ralya maintains a blog on his own quest through the entire list. Multiple podcasts now explore every book in Appendix N. Among them are Sanctum Secorum and the Appendix N Book Club, which received an Ennie Award nomination in 2022.