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  Recommended Reading
  
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  Role-playing is an imaginative hobby, where through discussion and
  sometimes negotiation an imaginary world is created and explored. No
  wonder that literature forms the basis of inspiration for the entire hobby.
  It is important to remember that many of these authors have had their
  work adapted to film. In every case the film greatly changes the story,
  and thoroughly destroys the essence of the original as often as not. Do
  not miss the opportunity to read a story just because you’ve seen the film.
  An expert filmmaker with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars
  can equal neither the spectacle nor the depth of what the humble writer
  accomplishes with mere words.
  Many of the authors on this list have appeared on many other such lists.
  It can be easy to assume that if you hear so many people talking about a
  thing, you come to know that thing yourself. This is not so. If you have
  not yet personally investigated the works of these oft-championed authors,
  whatever are you waiting for?
  (This is not a rhetorical question. What are you waiting for?)
  You will notice that most of the authors recommended here are quite old.
  This is no accident. Modern authors, even when writing of other times,
  tend to use modern thinking and modern language in their work, which
  makes everything seem so mundane. While the authors noted here surely
  did the same in their time, reading these stories after so much time brings
  the double wonder of the ideas as well as the expression of those ideas.
  The unfamiliar, and perhaps antiquated, language enhances the
  atmosphere of the whole.
  Surely the fact that many of these here authors were originators, and the
  shining lights of their time, helps, whereas history has not yet dimmed
  the lights on today’s imitators and faddish authors who won’t be
  remembered tomorrow. Exploring yesterday’s treasures is an endless, and
  endlessly satisfying, task. Sorting through today’s published work is
  tedium. Surely the same was true in 1850, 1900, and 1950, and surely it
  will still be true in 2050 and 2100.
  
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  The experience of reading a good story surpasses most others in life. All
  you have in life is time. Spend it wisely, and under sufficient lighting.
  Clive Barker
  A British-born, California-resident author and artist. His fantasy-horror
  stories are strongly informed by his openly homosexual orientation and
  rich visual imagination.
  Alienation is perhaps the classic Barkerian theme, recurring often enough
  to act almost as identifying hallmark. In a Barker story the protagonist
  typically feels dislocated from the workaday world even prior to the
  intrusion of the supernatural into their life. This alienation may stem from
  unhappy personal or working relationships (Sex, Death and Starshine),
  physical or mental health issues (The Life of Death, Cabal), ennui and a
  hunger for ever-greater sensation (Down, Satan!, Coldheart Canyon, The
  Hellbound Heart), or simply a nagging discontent with the world they
  know (The Forbidden, Midnight Meat Train).
  Fundamental to many tales is an active and positive amorality, perhaps
  best presented by the recurrent theme of the deliberate transgression of
  taboos cultural, social, or biological, as path to revelation and self-
  realisation. The changes subsequently experienced may be dislocating,
  disorienting, and horrific in form, but are ultimately painted as both fact
  of life and personal necessity. Even in manifestly horrific stories changed
  circumstances are often regarded as liberating or redemptive in nature.
  Restoration of a cozy, mundane status quo ante is neither expected, nor
  necessarily desirable.
  Recurring motifs in Barker's stories include the celebration of classic
  Americana (Coldheart Canyon, The Great and Secret Show, Son of
  Celluloid, Revelation); talismanic objects with hallucinogenic or hypnotic
  characteristics which act as portals between worlds (The Hellbound Heart,
  Weaveworld, Coldheart Canyon); baroque bodily transformation allied
  to an almost pagan reverence for the carnal (The Madonna, The Body
  Politic, In the Hills, the Cities, The Life of Death); and the sense that there
  
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  is no strong delineation between the mundane and the supernatural (omnia
  opera).
  The situations and subject matter used to explore these recurring themes
  and iconic motifs vary widely, ranging from intimate and macabre
  vignettes in many short stories, through affectionate literary homages (as
  in the horrific Pig Blood Blues and Scape-Goats, or the darkly comic The
  Yattering and Jack), to an American Gothic family saga involving
  squabbling old world godlings (Galilee) or a semi-satirical reworking of
  Tinseltown mythology and haunted house clichés (Coldheart Canyon),
  up to secret mystical wars and world-hopping odysseys (Imajica, The
  Great and Secret Show, Weaveworld).
  Mr Barker's works for younger readers (notably the Abarat series) skirt
  the more carnal elements of his adult horror fantasies, while retaining in
  full the characteristic Barker combination of wonder, menace and
  phantasmagoric visual invention.
  Start with: the short story collections Books of Blood (6 vols), or Abarat
  Follow with: any longer work. The Great and Secret Show, Weaveworld,
  etc.
  Robert E Howard
  Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) is a giant of sword and sorcery, heroic
  fantasy, and pulp adventure. His greatest, and best known creation, Conan
  the Barbarian, is practically a household name. Conan has been
  immortalized in short stories by Howard himself, and several other writers
  since, and in varied other media, such as cinema, comic books, and games.
  Several of Howard's other creations, such as the grim puritan Solomon
  Kane, King Kull of Atlantis, and the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn are also
  widely known. It is safe to say that Howard's huge body of work is one
  of the foundations upon which a whole literary genre rests.
  Howard was born and raised in a small town in Texas. His father, Isaac
  Howard, was a country doctor, a profession that entailed frequent lengthy
  absences from home. His mother, Hester, had tuberculosis and was ill of
  
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  health for most of Howard's life. Howard was a very bookish and
  intelligent child, but also (perhaps surprisingly) a fan of boxing, even
  taking up amateur boxing himself. He had dreamed of becoming a writer
  since childhood, but didn't have any real success until the age of
  twenty-three. In his time he was published in a wide selection of
  magazines, journals and newspapers, but his main outlet was the pulp
  magazine Weird Tales.
  Howard was successful in several literary genres, and was on the verge
  of publishing his first novel when he committed suicide at the young age
  of thirty. When he learned that his terminally ill mother had entered a
  coma from which she was not expected to wake, he, for reasons unknown,
  walked out to his car and shot himself. The suicide and the circumstances
  surrounding it have led to varied speculation about Howard's mental
  health. The truth of the matter remains undiscovered.
  Of Howard's creations there are a few which merit special mention.
  Conan the Cimmerian, the dark-browed, mighty-thewed barbarian, is the
  epitome of the sword-wielding fighting-man, and yet he is also so much
  more. During his long and illustrious career he becomes a mercenary, a
  thief, a pirate, a warlord, a general, and eventually, the King of the
  Aquilonia, the mightiest empire of the Hyborian age. Far from being just
  the muscle-bound brute he's sometimes portrayed as, Conan is the
  quintessential adventurer, a man who makes his own fortune by blade,
  guile, will, and pure might. Every adventuring character since has at least
  some of Conan in him. The Hyborian Age, the fictional pre-historic era
  Howard created for his characters, has also had a huge influence on fantasy
  settings, and especially role-playing settings since. It is a hybrid of varied
  influences, borrowings from history and myth, all thrown into a melting
  pot. Foremost, the Hyborian Age is created specifically to be a playground
  for fantastic storytelling, with enough familiar elements for anyone to
  relate to, to enable the reader (or in the case of role-playing games, the
  player) to relate to the protagonist.
  The rapier and pistol wielding puritan Solomon Kane also deserves
  mentioning. Like Conan, Kane is a man who lives his life sword in hand,
  
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  facing danger at every turn, and besting insurmountable odds. Kane is
  characterized by his drive to protect those he sees as innocent and good.
  He is a civilized man living in an age that has turned its back to the light.
  The Kane stories are set in our own history, with a supernatural twist.
  Delve deeper and you will discover a world shrouded in darkness,
  populated by secrets, and infested by evil in all its forms. If you're looking
  for literary equivalents of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess'
  definition of weird as something out of place in an otherwise familiar
  seeming setting, then look no further than Robert E. Howard's Solomon
  Kane.
  In a career that spanned barely twelve years, Howard wrote well over a
  hundred stories for the pulp magazines of his day. He created thrilling,
  vividly realized adventures populated by larger-than-life characters. His
  writing has a powerful dynamism which has enabled his stories to stand
  the test of time. So enduring is the appeal of his work that over seven
  decades later he continues to gain new fans, and inspire subsequent
  generations of fantasy writers. To this day Howard remains a highly read
  author. He has been compared to such American masters of the weird as
  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Jack London. The dynamism
  of his writing, and the strength of his characters have been compared to
  Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler. Among writers of heroic
  fantasy, Howard has no equal.
  Fritz Leiber
  Born in Chicago in 1910 to professional stage and screen actor parents,
  Fritz Leiber’s half-century writing career covered horror, fantasy, science
  fiction and nonfiction. His first book, the horror novel Conjure Wife, has
  been adapted for the screen three times, and a fourth version is in the
  works. Our Lady of Darkness, however, was his last and probably greatest
  horror novel, and the one that has garnered the greatest acclaim. Leiber’s
  science fiction novels include The Big Time, A Spectre is Haunting Texas,
  The Wanderer, and the humorous The Silver Eggheads. Leiber often wrote
  about apocalyptic and alternate timeline settings.
  
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  Leiber was a multiple Hugo, Nebula, Derleth, Lovecraft, and World
  Fantasy Award winner. He is credited with coining the term ‘Sword &
  Sorcery’ and for creating two of the genre’s most recognizable and
  enjoyable characters: Fafhrd the barbarian and his nimble companion, the
  Gray Mouser. The two appeared in Leiber’s first published story, Two
  Sought Adventure, in the August 1939 issue of Unknown. The last Fafhrd
  and Gray Mouser tale, The Knight and Knave of Swords, was published
  in 1988. These stories and these characters have had an enduring influence
  on fantasy roleplaying, and for good reason.
  Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales are almost prototypical Sword and
  Sorcery— stories in which magic works and gods are real, and where
  stalwart warriors find themselves in direct conflict with supernatural evil.
  Leiber’s works share these same elements with the stories of Robert E.
  Howard. Leiber’s stories also owe a great debt to Lovecraft’s weird tales,
  which is unsurprising, as Leiber was a great fan of, and advocate for,
  Lovecraft’s writing. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are constantly
  confronting or being confronted by malign supernatural forces, be they
  murderous practitioners of the black arts (Ill met in Lankhmar), vile cults
  (The Cloud of Hate), malevolent, sentient towers (The Jewels in the
  Forest), or incomprehensible beings from outside space and time (Bazaar
  of the Bizarre). In each of these stories and many others, it is a
  combination of skill, daring, luck and determination that sees the pair
  through.
  As a genre writer, Leiber stands midway between two of his own literary
  icons: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. Leiber’s detached, wry
  writing style is considered polished compared to some of the writings of
  Howard and Lovecraft, which can at times be stylistically over the top,
  but the main difference between the three lies in the fact that Howard
  always wrote from the gut, and Lovecraft from the head, while Leiber
  tended to write from the heart. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are heroes,
  warriors and adventurers, but they are also thieves, womanizers and
  drunkards. They are human, complex, fallible and humorous—and
  extremely likeable because of it.
  
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  Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories have been collected into
  a two volume set in the Fantasy Masterworks series published by
  Gollancz. Look for The First Book of Lankhmar and The Second Book
  of Lankhmar.
  HP Lovecraft
  Howard Phillip Lovecraft (1890-1937), the gentleman from Providence,
  is one of the most influential writers of speculative fiction of the 20th
  century. Though his stories are relatively little-known and have not
  directly given birth to any Hollywood blockbusters (though not, horribly,
  for lack of trying), his influence is today nearly everywhere, from
  literature to music to movies to roleplaying games. Stephen King credits
  him as a primary influence, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker and Alan Moore
  have all tipped him their hats, and his extensive correspondence with other
  writers of weird fiction in his time ensured that his legacy not only lived
  on but was built upon and developed by those who survived him. The
  name of Cthulhu has entered the popular lexicon, and references to
  Lovecraft’s work are practically everywhere, if one knows what to look
  for.
  The Man
  He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and spent most of his life there,
  with the exception of some two years in the mid-1920s that he lived in
  New York City during his ill-fated marriage. He was an eccentric
  personality, perhaps even neurotic, and spent long periods of his life
  practically as a hermit. Though Lovecraft never went to university, he
  was well-read, keenly intelligent and possessed an exceptional memory.
  He also never learned a trade, making money by selling his stories to pulp
  magazines and revising the work of other writers. He died of colon cancer
  at the age of 46.
  H.P. Lovecraft was a prolific writer. During his life, he wrote over sixty
  short stories and novellas, a few hundred poems, another few hundred
  articles on science, literary criticism and other miscellaneous topics, and,
  
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  according to the Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, nearly 100,000 letters – and
  he was not given to sending short notes, either.
  While the Cthulhu Mythos that nowadays suffuses popular culture so
  thoroughly originated with Lovecraft, its modern form is the result of
  adding, lifting and collaboration between many writers from the 1920s to
  this day. The original Lovecraft Circle, writers who corresponded with
  Lovecraft, includes names such as Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan
  the Barbarian and Solomon Kane), Robert Bloch (Psycho), Fritz Leiber
  (the “Lankhmar” tales) and less well known but still significant writers
  such as Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth (largely responsible for
  keeping Lovecraft in print after his death), Clark Ashton Smith and Henry
  Kuttner.
  Later critics have often attacked Lovecraft for being racist, and not entirely
  without justification. Certainly, a kind of passive racism was quite
  prevalent among the white middle class of the age, but Lovecraft, at times,
  went above and beyond the norm. During his two years in New York City,
  he consistently failed to find work and blamed this on the immigrant
  populations, in a classic case of “darned foreigners coming here and taking
  our jobs”. This is especially visible in his short story “The Horror at Red
  Hook”, written during his stay. Then again, he also married a Jew. The
  topic of Lovecraft’s racism is a complex one, and a deeper examination
  is beyond the scope of this essay.
  The Tales
  H.P. Lovecraft’s reputation primarily rests on his horror stories, which
  number 51, and of those, on a core of some two dozen tales of the weird.
  Lovecraft worked almost exclusively in short fiction and most of his weird
  tales are short stories, with a handful of novellas and one novel-length
  work, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which did not see print until
  after Lovecraft’s death. His most famous tale, however, is “The Call of
  Cthulhu”, which later lent its name to the roleplaying game Call of
  Cthulhu in 1981, itself a classic that is still popular today.
  
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  The premise of Lovecraft’s horror is that of an uncaring universe,
  where humanity is insignificant and ultimately doomed. It is populated
  by unknowable and monstrous creatures and their even stranger gods, all
  alien in every sense of the word. When they exhibit any interest toward
  mankind at all, it is malicious. To gaze upon them is to court madness,
  and brushes with the supernatural usually end badly for mere mortals.
  However, while Lovecraft’s fiction has a reputation of being nihilistic
  and hopeless, it is somewhat exaggerated. While the fate of many of his
  protagonists is to die gruesomely or lose their mind, in several of his
  stories the darkness is not only held back for another day but decisively
  defeated. Victories, though, never come without sacrifices.
  Lovecraft’s most common setting is his native New England and the
  fictional towns he set therein – Arkham, Kingsport, Dunwich and
  Innsmouth, though he is not confined to these locales. His settings play
  a great role in his stories, brought alive by his vivid and lavish prose. In
  Lovecraft’s New England, evil lurks in the deep forests and in the
  uncharted rolling hills, and reaches forth its hand from the history of the
  region, from the Salem witch trials and from ancient times beyond the
  reckoning of man.
  The archetypical Lovecraft protagonist is an academic, perhaps a professor
  at Miskatonic University in Arkham, whose studies lead him to uncover
  things that should have been left alone. Archeology and history are
  especially dangerous areas of study, though higher mathematics is not
  without its hazards. In Lovecraft’s stories, learning is dangerous and
  ignorance is bliss – this from a scholarly author who himself quite valued
  learning and whose writing rewards the educated reader.
  One recurring theme in his stories is ancient books of mystic knowledge
  that may cost the reader their sanity or soul. The most iconic tome of
  forbidden lore in his works is the Necronomicon, written by the mad Arab
  Abdul Alhazred. Though wholly a creation of a Providence pulp writer,
  there exist a number of actual published works by that name, at least two
  of them hoaxes claiming to be actual spellbooks, a pair of art books by
  H.R. Giger, and novelty items. It is also the name of at least one Lovecraft
  anthology.
  
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  As with many writers of the pulp era, Lovecraft’s writing is partially in
  the public domain and partially owned by who-the-hell-knows. The
  copyrights of many of his stories are uncertain, and thus a large portion
  of his work, especially the important stories, can be legally found online,
  on websites such as Wikisource (http://en.wikisource.org) or the
  Australian Project Gutenberg (http://gutenberg.net.au).  H.P. Lovecraft’s
  works are also being constantly reprinted and are easy to find.
  For a good introduction to Lovecraft, a reader could do worse than begin
  with the short stories “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Colour out of Space”,
  “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Rats in the Walls”, the novellas At the
  Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and the novel The
  Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Other popular works are the novellas The
  Shadow out of Time and The Whisperer in Darkness, and the short stories
  “The Dreams in the Witch House”, “The Haunter of the Dark”, “The
  Music of Erich Zann”, “Pickman’s Model”, “The Shunned House”, “The
  Statement of Randolph Carter”, “The Temple” and “The Thing on the
  Doorstep”. He also wrote a number of more fantastical stories, strongly
  inspired by Lord Dunsany, set in the Dreamlands. By far the best of these
  are “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” and “The Cats of Ulthar” and the
  novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Finally, he is the author
  of the essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
  Edgar Allan Poe
  Called ‘the first truly American writer’ by William Carlos Williams, Edgar
  Allen Poe was a poet, fiction writer and essayist of special genius. He was
  a master of literary structure and tone. Credited with the creation of the
  detective story and with being a strong influence on early science fiction
  writers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Poe is best known for his
  horror stories and dark poetry. It is generally agreed that he single-
  handedly redefined the American Gothic genre with his tales of mystery
  and macabre.
  Though he also occasionally wrote satires, ‘fantasies’ and humorous tales,
  it would be difficult to overstate Poe’s influence on the horror genre.
  
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  Whether writing stories of psychological horror and madness (The Pit
  and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado),
  supernatural horror (The Masque of the Red Death, The Fall of the House
  of Usher) or superficially ‘straight’ detective fiction (The Murders in the
  Rue Morgue), Poe imbued his stories with an eerie, compelling and utterly
  controlled atmosphere of weirdness and doom that has lost none of its
  power over time.
  Poe’s personal life was a difficult and a poor one, marked by tragedy and
  failure. His actor father abandoned the family when Poe was a year old,
  and his mother died of tuberculosis a year later. His (much) younger wife
  also died of tuberculosis. The disease and death of his wife had a deep
  effect on Poe, who turned to drink. Her loss marked his poetry and prose,
  already rather dark to begin with.
  Poe’s death might have been a mystery he himself wrote. On September
  27, 1849, Poe left Richmond, Virginia for New York. He disappeared for
  a week. On October 3 he was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore,
  wearing clothes that were not his own. He died in a drunk ward of
  Washington College Hospital on October 7, never having gained enough
  lucidity to explain what had happened to him. The cause of death is still
  debated.
  Robert Louis Stevenson said of Poe’s work that it had ‘a certain jarring
  note, a taint of something we do not care to dwell on or even find a name
  for.’ While that may or may not have been true when Stevenson wrote it,
  not too many more decades would pass before H. P. Lovecraft would find
  a name for Poe’s macabre story type—the weird tale. And as the success
  of pulp magazines of the time proved, people not only cared to dwell on
  such stories, they had a near-insatiable appetite for it. They—we—still
  do, as the multi-billion dollar horror film and book industry proves.
  From a role-playing perspective, the works of Edgar Allen Poe offer a
  master class in the creation of a macabre, oppressive tone and atmosphere.
  For readers new to Poe, at a minimum they should read the short stories
  The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale
  Heart and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The poems The Bells, The
  
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  Raven, A Dream Within a Dream and Annabel Lee should also be
  considered required reading. For those intrigued by Poe’s end, the 2006
  independent film The Death of Poe may be of interest.
  Clark Ashton Smith
  In 1893, the year that Clark Ashton Smith was born, railroad chronometers
  went into common use, and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair featured
  electric lights. The mystery of the frontiers was being standardized, and
  technology was firing the first shots in humanity's war against the darkness
  of night.
  Into this world of change, Smith was born into California cabin life and
  had only eight years of formal grammar school education. His precocious
  and astute mind allowed him to become his own teacher, learning other
  languages and continuing to absorb epic amounts of reading. Writing his
  own stories at an early age, Smith's imagination was influenced by classic
  fantasy, adventure, and horror stories, and his first published work was
  pieces of poetry. Although known primarily as a writer, he was gifted in
  several visual arts, including painting and sculpture. His ability to
  conceptualize visual narratives was instrumental in bringing the
  otherworldly and exotic into believable and readable written stories. This
  kind of writing, focusing on the strange, fantastic, and otherworldly was
  shared with fellow writers H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. The
  three wrote for Weird Tales and served as Furies waging a war of
  vengeance against the dry conservatism of fiction writing at a time when
  frontiers were vanishing, the adventure of global colonialism was ending,
  and even the fear of darkness was under seige by advances in technology.
  Weird Tales gave Smith a stage upon which he could renew a readers fear
  of the dark, remind them of the wildness of the exotic, and rekindle their
  lust for adventures to the far away.
  His contributions to role playing games are invaluable just in terms of
  imaginative storytelling: bringing the spanning vistas of the alien and
  heroic to the masses, showing that light isn't enough to fight darkness,
  introducing readers to worlds and strange entities that are beyond
  comprehension, describing characters confronting evils that are beyond
  
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  negotiation, and more. Beyond these literary elements, Smith put forth a
  visual lexicon and descriptive method of handling text that have not just
  inspired role playing game development, but created a method of textual
  description and visual storytelling that is currently used today. His
  influence extends beyond stories into not just role playing, but also graphic
  novels, comics and computer games. The symbolic language of fantasy,
  horror, and adventure owes a great debt to the efforts of Smith and his
  contemporaries.
  A large part of Smith's appeal is his treatment of characters, even ancient,
  evil beings of godlike presence. The relentless worm Rlim Shaikorth, and
  the elk goddess Yhoundeh hunting the sorcerer Eibon. The arachnid
  Atlach-Nacha, astride a web linked to the Dreamlands of H. P. Lovecraft.
  The heroic valor of Gaspard Du Nord, wielding alchemic mastery against
  Colossus of Nathaire the necromancer. The simple and stark narrative of
  the explorer Satampra Zeiros, adventuring in the temple of the grotesque
  Tsathoggua, and the questing of the luckless Ralibar Vooz.
  The people and places in the works of Smith have heavy influence over
  role playing game development, in particular the Averoigne Series and
  the Zothique Cycle story The Dark Eidolon. The wonder, horror, mystery,
  and revelation in Smith's stories has inspired a generation of game masters
  and players of numerous role playing games to create similar worlds of
  dying decadence, expansive unknowns, ancient evils, and exotic madness.
  The Hyperborean, Averoigne, and Zothique cycles together seem to form
  an answer to the question of the Sphinx, describing worlds crawling in
  innocent terror like the newly born, standing wise and strong against
  ancient evil, and lurching, corrupt and exhausted, towards the void.
  Smith's fantasy writing ended after the death of his friend H. P. Lovecraft
  in 1937, and his focus turned towards sculpture and other artistic pursuits.
  By the time of his death in 1961, heroism and frontiers had changed. It
  was the year a man from Earth plunged into the sea in a Mercury space
  capsule, and an era of comic books was started by four characters who
  were astronauts exposed to radiation who would become elemental
  themed superheroes. The darkness surrounding the cabins of California
  was kept at bay by electric lights, the exotic colonies were becoming
  
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  nations, frontiers were standardized by clocks and maps, and Smith's
  extensive works rested gracefully in attics and on bookshelves, quietly
  whispering an adventurer's call to another generation.
  JRR Tolkien
  JRR Tolkien is a writer so famous, his work so well known, that it almost
  seems wasteful to use space to list him as an influence. Undoubtedly the
  most influential fantasy writer of modern times, Tolkien’s work presents
  the definitive version of a great many fantasy standards: Dwarfs, elves,
  halflings, the “big quest,” the adventuring party, dungeons, wizard towers,
  evil humanoids, and a dozen other things I’m overlooking because they
  are so prevalent it’s hard to imagine that one person was responsible for
  the creation of the archetype.
  But you know this already. Tolkien’s ideas are so pervasive, so assumed,
  that using elements of Tolkien’s rich work, being directly inspired by his
  unending imagination, is so commonplace, that a Tolkienesque fantasy
  world is considered “vanilla” by many commentators.
  But read The Lord of the Rings again, and put away any thoughts of how
  “epic” it is, and don’t view it as an adventure story.
  Think of Frodo’s journey, from the flight from Hobbiton, dealing with
  malign trees, nearly captured by ringwraiths, stalked by a mutant
  psychopath, taken by a giant spider, and the final push through Mordor
  and the final temptation of the Ring. This is a horror story full of many
  dark things.
  The Fellowship was guided by Gandalf and aided by many. But what if
  a random traveler, without previous connections or an epic quest,
  happened upon Bombadil, or Beorn, or stumbled into Rivendell? Perhaps
  there would be no friendly reception.
  And there is no happy ending to The Lord of the Rings. It is a bittersweet
  tale, and even as victory is achieved, all that everyone had fought to save
  had already been lost just from the fact that it had to be fought for.
  
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  Not just simple adventure, then.
  Many stumble by looking to Tolkien’s Silmarillion as a how-to for
  role-playing world-building. The history of Middle-Earth is entrenched
  in every description and location that the Fellowship visits. There are
  lessons to be learned here, but where the stumbling occurs is that Referees
  attempt to front-load all of that information. A richly detailed world with
  an extensive history is the result of a long campaign, not its beginning.
  Jack Vance
  Jack Vance may be the most famous name in RPGs not attached to an
  artist or designer. Born in 1916, his early adult life was a series of
  misadventures and near-escapes. He worked for a time in numerous odd
  jobs before attending UC Berkley where he bounced from major to major
  for six years. Necessity sent him to Pearl Harbor, working as an
  electrician, only to leave a mere month before the Japanese bombed it in
  1941. Poor eyesight kept him out of the military, but attempts to learn
  Japanese in an Army Intelligence program were met with failure. He
  finally published his first professional story in 1946, while living in the
  bohemian community of San Francisco. Like Robert Howard, he wrote
  what he knew, and so his books are full of characters down on their luck,
  scoundrels and odd sorts lost but thriving (after a fashion) between
  society’s cracks.
  Society, biology and culture loom large in his novels. Even his science
  fiction tends to focus more on anthropology and less on anti-matter
  reactors. In The Languages of Pao, where a sorcerer, an usurper, and a
  tyrant-in-training vie for the soul of a world through manipulating the
  languages of its people, the line between sorcery and technology is blurry.
  Things are even more so in his Dying Earth novels, set in the distant future
  where our sun has shrunk to an angry red orb, and the promise of our
  future has been squandered into a bitter inheritance for a doomed
  humanity. Onto this stage prance, creep, and crawl a motley collection of
  scoundrels, broken souls, and sorcerers.
  
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  The sorcerers are especially noteworthy for RPGs. The system for magic
  used in the Dying Earth novels was adapted for use in Dungeons &
  Dragons. Vancian magic, as it’s called, involves memorizing spells which
  are then “forgotten” as they are cast and remains a popular choice in RPGs
  still.
  Of equal importance to gaming is the style of his stories, which tend to
  combine the picaresque with caper-like hijinks. The quest for new spells,
  the backstabbing and treachery, the sardonic humor and moody locations
  that give Vance’s worlds their style and flavor are now well known to
  gamers who have never read his works. His characters are not superheroes,
  but flawed, sometimes tragically so, some with “vacuums” in their minds
  and others utterly incapable of experiencing pleasure. Where science and
  technology mingle, where certain doom is faced with a wry quip, and
  where “heroes” are known for their greed and duplicity, the tone was set
  by Vance.
  The richest flavor is probably found in his Dying Earth novels: The Dying
  Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel’s Saga, and Rhialto the
  Marvellous. For a slightly more Science Fantasy style, try his novels of
  the Demon Princes: The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of
  Love, The Face, and The Book of Dreams.
  Jules Verne
  The French counterpart to HG Wells, Verne is credited, along with Wells,
  with inventing the modern genre of science fiction. More than that, he is
  probably the steampunk novelist par excellence. His novels, written during
  the 19th century, include such modern conveniences as air conditioning,
  television, tasers, and, of course, submarines, all described with a
  Victorian flair. Every clockwork golem, electrified trap, or steam-powered
  doomsday device found in the annals of fantasy RPGs owes a tip of the
  hat to Verne.
  Verne was born on February 8th of 1828, a full 38 years before Wells and
  less than ten years before Victoria was crowned. His father wanted him
  to be a lawyer, but from a young age Verne was drawn to words. He wrote
  
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  poems, songs, and stories in his youth, but didn’t have his first novel
  published until he was 35, and one of his novels, Paris in the Twentieth
  Century, didn’t see print until 130 years after it was written.
  Verne was inspired by the dark, macabre writings of Edgar Allen Poe. He
  even penned a fan-fic sequel to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
  Pym of Nantucket. Like Poe, Verne was fascinated by the darkness in
  human souls and minds and his novels are laced with the more sinister
  aspects of human nature.
  Unfortunately for Verne, his publisher insisted readers wanted lighter fare
  and happy endings. For the most part, Verne accommodated these
  demands and his popularity certainly didn’t suffer from this. Still, some
  works (like Paris in the Twentieth Century) were apparently beyond
  anyone’s ability to “fix” and Verne’s grim pessimism remained on the
  page of even his most celebrated novels. In Verne’s stories, technology
  doesn’t bridge gaps so much as bring them into clear focus. The heroes
  in Around the World in Eighty Days struggle with the odd and often
  barbaric customs of those they meet, thwarting human sacrifices and
  narrowly escaping enraged natives. Captain Nemo doesn’t use his
  wondrous submarine to regale the world with Jacque-Cousteau-like
  images of undersea animals and ecologies, but to wage a war of vengeance
  upon the British Empire. When scientists undertake A Journey to the
  Center of the Earth, in spite of encounters with ravening dinosaurs and
  errant orbs of electrical phenomena, they are most unsettled by an
  encounter that throws a warped, fun-house mirror reflection upon their
  own concept of what it means to be human.
  This then is Verne’s universe; a place of infinite mystery that even science
  cannot render utterly tame or knowable. While his vision is not nearly as
  bleak or horrific as Lovecraft’s, it’s no less darkly alluring or explicable
  in its mystery.
  To get a taste of Verne’s dark travelogue style, the best place to start is A
  Journey to the Center of the Earth. The Mysterious Island offers classic
  mystery and suspense to the usual tale of castaways making the best of
  things on a tropical island. For a bleak dystopian “future” where the arts
  
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  exist only as government-sponsored swill for the masses, try his Paris in
  the Twentieth Century.
  HG Wells
  H.G. (Herbert George) Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England in
  1866. Growing up in a family that was constantly teetering on the brink
  of financial ruin, Wells turned to reading at a young age as a means of
  escape. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895. The book was an
  overnight sensation and firmly established Wells as one of England's
  leading authors. Although his literary career went on to span five decades,
  he is chiefly remembered today for his early works, a series of "scientific
  romances" that, along with the novels of Jules Verne, laid the groundwork
  for modern-day science fiction.
  Unlike Verne, and despite his educational background in the sciences,
  Wells often hand-waived the technical explanations underlying his tales
  of gentleman inventors and mad scientists. Verne himself, while
  maintaining that he had " the highest respect for [Wells'] imaginative
  genius," opined that Wells' fiction "belong[s] unreservedly to an age and
  degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I
  will not say entirely beyond the limits of the possible." It is in this
  willingness to look beyond the simply plausible and to imagine what is
  merely possible that Wells distinguished himself as a writer of great
  influence over the next generation of weird fiction authors.
  Wells often used his fiction as a vehicle for his beliefs about human nature,
  evolution, and politics, and most of his classic works are distinguished
  by meditations on social class and mankind's fate. Although he was a
  committed believer in Utopian societies, works like The Time Machine
  and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) refuted the contemporary Victorian
  optimism, faith in technology, and belief in the primacy of mankind.
  The Time Machine follows the narrator as he visits a future ruled by two
  degenerate strains of humans, descendents of the upper and lower classes.
  The narrator then travels to a time far in Earth's future and witnesses the
  last inhabitants of the planet, red crab-like creatures, die off as the Earth
  
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  hurtles towards a dimming Sun, thus making The Time Machine one of
  the first "dying Earth" novels. The Island of Dr. Moreau is an even darker
  tale of dark science run amok and the bestial nature of man. Although it
  was part of an emerging genre of "invasion novels," War of the Worlds
  (1898) was the first such work to cast the invaders as extraterrestrials,
  establishing an enduring sub-genre of science fiction.
  From invasions of grotesque aliens to savage hybrid mutants to battles
  against degenerate subterraneans to tales of the dying Earth, Wells has
  passed down an entire lexicon of ideas germane to weird/horror gaming.
  Lastly, no gaming-centered biography of Wells would be complete
  without mentioning Little Wars (1913), a set of recreational wargame
  rules considered the first "modern" miniatures game rules; their
  significance for the development of RPGs can be appreciated by the fact
  that Gary Gygax saw fit to pen a foreword to the 2004 reprinting.
  Others
  Anderson, Poul (The Broken Sword, etc)
  Bierce, Ambrose (everything!)
  Blackwood, Algernon (The Willows, etc)
  Bradbury, Ray (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
  Carroll, Lewis (Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass)
  Chambers, Robert W. (The King in Yellow)
  Doyle, Arthur Conan (The Lost World, etc)
  Dumas, Alexandre (The Three Musketeers, etc)
  Hodgson, William Hope (House on the Borderlands, The Night Lands,
  etc)
  Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey)
  Joshi, ST (The Weird Tale, The Evolution of the Weird Tale)
  King, Stephen (Eyes of the Dragon, Cycle of the Werewolf, the Dark
  Tower series)
  Lord Dunsany (most everything)
  Malory, Sir Thomas (Le Morte d’Arthur)
  Merritt, A. (The Moon Pool, The Ship of Ishtar, etc)
  Moorcock, Michael (Elric stories, Von Bek stories, Corum stories, many,
  many others)
  
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  Orwell, George (1984, Animal Farm)
  Shakespeare, William (MacBeth, Hamlet, etc)
  Shelley, Mary (Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, The Last Man)
  Stephenson, Robert Louis (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
  Treasure Island)
  Stoker, Bram (Dracula, Lair of the White Worm, etc)
  Swift, Jonathan (Gulliver’s Travels)
  Wilde, Oscar (The Picture of Dorian Grey)
  HP Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature remains the greatest
  reading resource for those interested in Weird tales.
  Credits: Introduction, Tolkien, and Others by James Edward Raggi IV,
  Fritz Leiber and Edgar Allan Poe by Michael McClung, HP Lovecraft by
  Jukka Särkijärvi, Clark Ashton Smith by Scott S., HG Wells by David
  Larkins, Jack Vance and Jules Verne by James Murphy, Clive Barker by
  Chris Hogan, Robert E. Howard by Juhani Seppälä. Illustration by Dean
  Clayton. Proofreading by Maria Kyytinen.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Lamentations of the Flame Princess/LotFP Box Set/LotFP Box Recommended Reading.pdf