Tag Archives: RPGs

I see that Trollsmyth has posted his response to the question on the blog “Lamentations of the Flame Princess” about literary influences on your gaming. So I thought I’d give it a shot as well.  I’m not going to limit it to books, but just list my main influences – book, movie, game, etc.

Early Influences

I actually started with science fiction gaming. As a youngster I read a huge amount of SF and fantasy, but mostly SF. It’s actually hard to break down those literary influences because I read so much – I read fast and could easily do a full novel in a day (especially on a summer day or weekend), and so read pretty much everything in the SF section of our local library – and it’s not a small library.  So in one sense it’s fair to say “1970s and 1980s scifi” in general.  I would say that the most important, however, was:

Books (SF): Isaac Asimov, specifically the Robot (you know, the Three Laws of Robotics) short stories and novels – I, Robot, The Caves of Steel, et al. These led me to take joy in stories that flow from the “rules of the world.” Most of the tension and cleverness in the Robot stories were directly from how the Three Laws were applied to specific situations. I think this may be where my strong simulationist streak comes from. To this day I think that a set of rules creating a realistic world usually aids, and very seldom detracts from, a story.

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Woot! Paizo Publishing has another game designer fave joining them – Sean K. Reynolds! After Monte Cook joined the Pathfinder team recently too, that’s double good news. It’s tempered by Erik Mona deciding to semi-retire from RPG writing. I think Paizo and Green Ronin should join up now and wipe WotC off the f***ing map. Get Robin Laws in there too and it’s the whole list of my favorite game designers (Tweet’s clearly lost his soul to WotC, unfortunately.)