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Some house keeping:
This list is long (nearly 3000 words). I’ve offered a bit of insight for each entry.
There’s not enough books on here, I know. I’m awful at finishing books and it’s a substantial deficit on my part that I haven’t committed myself to consuming more literature. Guilty as charged.
There’s a fair bit of stuff that’s not fantasy or science fiction. I often find myself taking inspiration at ‘odd angles’. It probably explains why I secretly love mundane modern settings.
There are no comics or board games. I’ve never been a reader of comics, and my board game experience is nothing worth talking about!
These works may contain difficult subjects or offensive content, or have creators who held (or hold) problematic beliefs. Which is to say none of them represent my own opinions or beliefs. Do your own due diligence before engaging with any of these works.
Let’s get started.
Literature
This is the shortest section (yes I’m terribly uncultured) and it has some obvious picks.
The Lord of the Rings
No surprises here. I think the Hobbit is a better book, but the darker trappings of Tolkien’s epic informed me from a young age. Menacing towers, the Nazgul, and the Balrog planted a love for dark fantasy themes in me.
Skulduggery Pleasant
This YA dark-comedy urban fantasy-horror series was the mainstay of my tweens. It’s a mix of pulpy fantasy themes in a modern jumble of different ideas about magic, myth, and beasts. It’s not something I’d revisit, but it introduced me to the whole ‘modern gothic horror plus fantasy’ vibe.
MacBeth
I can’t really convey the adoration I have for this play. It’s the tragedy, and is oozing character complexity and internal conflict. It’s also a grounded dark fantasy epic in disguise. If you want for a performance of it, the 1979 film with Ian McKellen and Judy Dench might be my favourite.
HP Lovecraft
Lovecraft’s work continues to inspire me, from its cosmic scales to the imagination of its strange environments. What captures me most is Lovecraft’s prose though, his manner of description is enthralling. I couldn’t pick a single story, there is too much to pick from.
Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry
The gothic trappings of Poe’s poems are like little canisters of distilled melancholy. They inform not only my language, but also the feeling I want to evoke at the table. Nevermore is perhaps my favourite.
A Wizard of Earthsea
No one writes like Ursula K. Le Guinn, and a Wizard of Earthsea transported me into a mythic world full of wonder and creeping darkness. The prose in this book is pure GM fuel, the description of the Dragon of Pendor rising is a standout for me. It is a mythic story, full of failures and setbacks.
Termush
I think this is my favourite book currently. The short journal of a post-nuclear attack survivor sheltering in a ‘preppers’ hotel, Termush is cold, sinister, and uncannily mundane. It’s an atmosphere that I wish I could recreate a shred of at the table.
Films
Cinema has been a big influence on me from an early age. My dad is film fanatic, and made sure I spent my teen years watching stuff outside the typical blockbusters.
Pixar (2000s)
Specifically Monsters Inc. and the Incredibles. The diegetic world building of these films is top notch and demonstrated to me from a young age that there were no boundaries where imagination is concerned. Monsters Inc. is a heart wrenching story that involves a great deal of sacrifice. The Incredibles is still, in my opinion, one of the coolest spy films ever made.
Sleeping Beauty
The OG animation. Why? Maleficent. What a villain, a fantastically ruthless and nasty villain, who is still mysterious in nature. Her aesthetic as a dark fey queen is dialled in and her castle is the perfect antithesis to classic Disney castles.
There Will Be Blood
Silence. So much silence. Characters filled with anger, bile, and delusion. Familial rejection, the horror of greed, and a cold look at how monstrous humans can be. The shots in this film could each inspire a whole adventure.
No Country for Old Men
No one wins, life is messy and violent. This is a film where everything goes wrong for everyone and not in the funny way. There’s a sense of dread to the whole film, and it’s a great lesson on how to create and maintain tension.
Moon
Moon is the only sci-fi film that I think has truly influenced me in the long term (Empire Strikes Back aside, which doesn’t make the cut here). It captures what I associate most with the reality of space, isolation. It’s about being alone and having no idea what’s going on, but feeling deep down that something is wrong.
Valhalla Rising
An artistic journey of medieval mudcore ultraviolence crosspollinated with trippy dark spirituality. I have broadly loved Scandinavian cinema since I was a teen, but this with its ties to dark fantasy left the strongest impression on me, it is savage.
The Road
I’m ashamed to say I have yet to read the book, but the tone of utter hopelessness in this film captivated me. The sense of raw humanity and vulnerability is so thick you can cut it. It’s visceral in its often empty presentation. Less is more.
Womb (a.k.a. Clone)
A weird film for sure. Weird, creepy, and yet somehow… sad? It’s a demonstration of how a simple twist on an idea can form a disturbing situation, and Womb tells the strange story of the psychology behind that situation.
The Babadook
My favourite horror film, without a doubt. The Babadook is a masterclass in monster design, folding grounded psychology into horror, and gives a true sense of the walls closing in no matter how hard you try to push back. This is no gratuitous slasher, it has a powerful message behind it all.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
A sad film for sure, and a powerful one. This film excels at complex social dynamics centred around a traumatic event. It’s also an example of how crime drama doesn’t need to end with a mystery solved.
Doctor Sleep
This but not the Shining!? The Shining is great, but the antagonists in this film (based on the book) are delicious. It explores the psychic realm in much more detail than the first entry, building a trippy and sinister wider world.
The King (2019)
Based on Shakespeare’s Henriad, this adaptation fully embraces the mudcore of medieval warfare and violence. I love how freaking miserable this film is, victories feel hollow and never worth the price.
TV series
Asides from a few notable entries, TV series are a much more recent influence on me (only having had my proper attention for the last 5 years or so).
Doctor Who
Specifically the David Tenant and Matt Smith eras (which I grew up with). Each episode is a case study in monster design and monsters as puzzles. Midnight is probably my favourite episode, with it being so psychological.
Merlin
A series I grew up with in my tweens. It explores Arthurian trappings in tones ranging from comedy to outright serious. The Pagan and Druidic themes are what caught me most, setting me on a path to exploring those in greater detail.
Broadchurch
A modern classic of British crime drama, Broadchurch excels at avoiding over-dramatics and grandiosity. It focuses on community relationships rather than ‘crime fighting’ and how trauma causes communities to change and shift.
The Handmaid’s Tale
This is a tough watch. Based on the famous book, it delves into a terrifying vision of a dystopian society that is based in the realities that many people of the past and today face. It doesn’t pull punches, and it unwaveringly conjures a world ruled by an oppressive regime that is outright sadistic in how it treats its victims. The content itself isn’t something I would ever bring to my table, but the atmosphere has a lot to teach.
Patrick Melrose
This mini-series is based on a series of books by Edward St Aubyn. It explores the impact of abuse and addiction in the backdrop of English ‘upper class’ society. It shines a light on how wealth often breeds trauma, rather than shielding us from it. It taught me how to make powerful characters vulnerable on the inside.
The Bear
This series is all about social dynamics and a fully realised picture of utter chaos. If you want to up your NPC game, or have an example of how to render tense and maddening chaos, this is perfect.
House of the Dragon
For me, this is far superior to the original Game of Thrones series. The game of politics is much clearer and more sensical. The presentation is less gratuitous and the characters more complex. A great case study for dark fantasy.
Ripley
A crime thriller where we follow the con-artist and we care about every single detail that he has to address to get away with it. This encouraged me to zoom in, when so often we are encouraged to lean on abstraction and skirting past the details. At my table, we care about the details, the details are what matter. I need to read the book.
Andor
A grittier take on sci-fi espionage set in my childhood beloved fictional universe? Sign me up. Andor is full of great examples of scenarios you could deploy at the gaming table, the prison break in particular.
Hannibal
Horrific, weird, and downright confusing at points, Hannibal is not a crime show as some suggest it is. It’s a horror series that, come the 3rd season, descends into a soup of utter madness. Hannibal, above all else, is visceral and twisted yet somehow grounded in a slither of reality. That’s what makes it a compelling work I think.
Video Games
This is where it all began, and video games remain the largest influence on me. Unlike these other works, which were still essential to my evolution, video games get my design brain turning. They showed me how imagination can create interactive experiences.
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
This is where it all started. A real-time turn-based Star Wars rpg built on a d20 system. It would be ten years later that I played my first tabletop session and my willingness to give it a shot was based on a friend saying ‘you’ll love it because you love KOTOR 2’.
What has stuck with me most are KOTOR 2’s characters, worldbuilding and quest design. Its characters are all complex creatures, with baggage. The world is damaged, morality is unclear, and to make it more interesting, this is partly your fault.
The quest design, whilst not modern now, did a great job of facilitating multiple ways you could slice the pie and offer different outcomes. It did a lot to shape me at 11-ish years old, and just like ‘echoes’ in the game, I still feel its influence now.
Kreia is still my favourite video game character ever, the voice acting by Sara Kestelman is astounding.
Dark Souls
The 1st entry in the trilogy. It’s the themes and world design for me. I supposed it also pushed me towards enjoying dungeon crawls but KOTOR 2 did that as well. Dark Souls excels at environmental design and interaction, whilst also delivering one of my favourite dark fantasy worlds to this day. Miyazaki’s take on Western dark fantasy through a Japanese lens is unique and compelling.
It doesn’t hold your hand as a game, you have to figure a lot out on your own, and that makes discoveries all the more rewarding.
Skyrim
An obvious pick, but an important one. Skyrim taught me the joy of exploration for exploration’s sake, and the value of having some level of comprehensiveness in world building. A huge amount of Skyrim’s day-to-day world makes sense. It has got a weird amount of immersive sim DNA in it. It’s hard to not take some inspiration from it.
Dishonored (1 & 2)
Immersive sims are some of my favourite games, and I think the Dishonored series is my favourite. The sheer detail and density of Dishonored’s levels is astonishing.
Thematically, the weird spark-punk Victorian-London injected with eldritch horror still draws me in. The world design, including the nuances of its layered characters and culture, sits on a pedestal for me. But best of all, is how you can choose to tackle these levels almost any way you can imagine. It’s a problem solving playground.
Dragon Age: Origins
A beast of a dark fantasy rpg, full of tough choices and general unpleasantness. The worldbuilding is solid, if quite inspired by Game of Thrones.
Magic in this game’s world is dangerous and its political tensions are not to be treated lightly. It also introduced me to mechanics, like random encounters whilst travelling, before I’d ever played a pen & paper game.
Breath of the Wild
Exploration, plain and simple. I don’t really have much more to say than that. BotW deepened my love for environmental design and overland travel. When I go back to it, it makes me want to run campaigns focused on overland exploration.
Hollow Knight
Incredible world design. Diegetic worldbuilding. Thematically creative and managing to walk the diametric line of adorable and horrible. Enthralling environments, and a prevailing sense that you aren’t supposed to fully understand the world around you.
It happens to be a fantastic example of a video-game-based megadungeon too. This game made me love megadungeons.
System Shock (Remake)
Speaking of megadungeons, System Shock is one hell of a megadungeon. Packed with tense resource management, risk charged exploration, and the process of creeping room to room whilst the infamous SHODAN tracks your every move.
All the while, you are largely free to address challenges however you like. It doesn’t hold your hand, it expects you to figure stuff out, and it’s all the more rewarding for it.
Prey (2017)
Prey might be one of the best video game dungeons ever made. The architectural design and interconnectivity, the chains of cause and effect, the sheer number of ways you can interact with the environment, the NPCs with hidden motivations but environmental clues that help you suss them out.
It’s a baffling level of design density wrapped in a weird sci-fi scenario that avoids purely relying on the slasher horror so prevalent in the genre. It’s nuanced, complex, and demands your critical thinking.
Music
When I’m prepping, the only media I can consume is music. I always have music on when I’m prepping and when I’m running. Plus it’s had a huge influence on me over the years (I play guitar). I’ve gone for 5 albums, otherwise I’ll write a list 20+ entries long.
Koloss (Meshuggah)
Many of Meshuggah’s albums could have made this list. But Koloss is the most tectonic and crushing of their work to my ears. It’s downright sinister sounding, just watch the music video for the title track and you’ll get the vibe. Meshuggah’s lyrics are existential, abstract, and outright Lovecraftian sometimes. Perfect for engineering dungeons filled with nightmares.
Måsstaden (Vildhjarta)
The wild dissonances and dynamic shifts of Vildhjarta’s quintessential ‘thall’ is a sonic exemplar of how the graceful and the visceral can be paired to create something very unsettling. Add to that the sense of chaos this music is exceptional background for designing horrible environments and creatures.
Fire by the Silos (Toska)
Toska’s only full length record, this is a masterwork of crushingly expansive soundscapes arranged in a progressive metal structure. Fire by the Silos is a fantastic album to design huge locations too, or anything where a sense of scale is needed. The sense of space encourages me to include emptiness in my designs, which is important.
Take Me Back to Eden (Sleep Token)
Hard to listen to this and not feel inspired. Huge compositions, moving vocals. This band has a ton of great work, but TMBTE is probably my favourite. If I need to write something that I hope will be moving, this album has my back.
Fear of the Fear (Spiritbox)
Spiritbox has some incredible stuff but this EP is the one I consistently come back to. It’s atmospheric, hits like sledgehammer when it wants, and always prompts energic writing when I need to liven things up.
Woah that was a long trip
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AMAZING!!!!
I love the explanations for it all and that you included music! I added all the music to my "To Check Out" playlist.
I've been slowing working on my Appendix N and have been surprised how much music is on there.