Appendix S
I’d hate to miss hopping on a blog bandwagon so here we go.
Here’s my list of genre inspirations that work their way into the games I run in some form or another. So, in no particular order:
The Princess Bride: An all time favorite of mine. I first saw it around the same age that the kid in the beginning was, so he was pretty much my surrogate for that first viewing. I too wasn’t down for a kissing story… or so I thought. This is the best fantasy film ever made and it's not negotiable. The film oozes charm and the fellowship of characters will forever be imprinted on my psyche. This film really has everything you can want out of a movie. Adventure, action, peril, romance, humor, wit and more heart than a cardiology clinic. It wears its imperfections on its sleeve but I absolutely adore it.
X-Men: Yeah all of it. I love the X-Men just in general. A band of outcast heroes who represent the next step in human evolution, but are shunned because of how weird that can be. Hell yeah, can’t get enough of them. They represent the constant fight for progress and equality. As our understanding of civil rights movements matures, so do the X-Men stories. Not all of them land. A whole lot of them seem to not care about that key theme in favor of just being bog standard cape-shit. The movies general place way too much focus on Wolverine, because he appeals to the male power fantasy and has an edgy backstory. But the best of these stories dare to explore these themes and be unapologetically weird. They also remember that the X-Men are supposed to be a team. A family, even. Grant Morisson’s New X-Men run and Jonathan Hickman’s House of M are particular standouts. Though I do hold a special place in my heart for the classic Chris Claremont era, which was unashamedly gonzo. X-Men 97 is also peak.
The Thing (1982): John Carpenter’s remake of a classic B-Movie is the perfect example of location based horror. Sure there is a monster, but the real fear is that you can’t escape it. Worse yet… It’s hiding in YOU. Also has some absolutely unparalleled in-camera special effects and gnarly creature design. It’s the perfect exercise in mounting paranoia. Repeat viewings let you play detective and pay attention to how the alien spreads among its hosts. It’s extremely subtle, but that’s the fun of it. The film keeps you on your toes by not making it obvious. It could be within anyone of the film’s ensemble and they wouldn’t even know it. That's what makes it terrifying.
Alien (1979): This is really on here because of H.R. Giger’s designs. Yeah it’s been done to death since, but go look at his original sketches. It’s timeless and beautiful in its own way. Ridley picked the right guy for the job and the franchise has been coasting off his talent ever since. Even the design of the Space Jockey is so unique and adds so much depth to the setting even for its brief appearance. Future franchise installments completely killed the mystery, as expanded canon tends to do. In this day and age, the setting is starting to feel a little stale. Even the xenomorph is losing some of its bite. But that original film still has the sauce.
Evil Dead: Not a single bad film in the canon. Not a single one, I say! The first is a stripped back nightmare trip. The second is Raimi throwing in every idea he could come up with into one film. Army of Darkness is an absolute meme of a film that actually works. Fede Alvarez’s remake is a gnarly re-imagining of the first film, that shows off its new director’s horror chops. Rise is an original entry in the series that brings in new blood (teehee) with a fresh location and cast and lets director Lee Cronin go hog-wild with his ideas. In short - its my favorite horror series (Final Destination is a close second) for being so director driven while retaining the original’s spirit which is really all about going hard as fuck, no matter the technical/financial constraints.
Terry Gilliam’s films: One of those fearless fantasists the film industry could never fully support. Too weird to live, too rare to die, so the saying goes. No matter how small the budget he’s working with is, Gilliam’s films feel huge. They are all overstuffed with ideas, for better or worse. Jabberwocky is the default setting of any DND campaign I run. It's a low fantasy world of shit and filth where a complete idiot gets to actually be the hero through dumb luck. It’s the tongue and cheek attitude towards the grimness that makes it so compelling. It reminds you that Grim Dark was actually a form of satire, before the world seemingly missed that point. Time Bandits is also one that carries the adventure game spirit of coming up with insane capers that just might work. Gilliam’s films are all extremely tactile and filled with hand-crafted details everywhere you look. Realism is eschewed for exaggeration, which comes from Gilliam’s roots as a cartoonist. It’s the perfect style of presentation for wonderfully chaotic worlds and the larger than life characters that live there.
Primal: Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated masterpiece is a shining example of economic storytelling. That is not me saying it was cheap to make. Films made on shoestring budgets have more excess. This show, through its own constraints, has to communicate its ideas in the most efficient and effective ways possible through sound and moving image. No words are spoken, at all. Out of two central characters, one is a fucking T-Rex with 0 anthropomorphic features, and yet it gets a powerful, emotional arc. That’s storytelling sorcery, my friends. The world beyond is also vast and mythic. It is pure pulp, with clear sword and sorcery influences. You never know what lies around the corner and the art direction ensures that it all holds together cohesively. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you say Hell Yeah.
First Law Trilogy: Joe Abercrombie’s original trilogy always stayed with me since reading it. It kinda got me back into reading fantasy as an adult. I just loved how deeply it explored the psyche of its characters who all felt so real. By the end of the trilogy I knew these people intimately. Glotka, Logen, Jezal, Dogman, Major West and Ferro have never left my imagination. I guess it’s because I spent so much time in their heads. First Law doesn’t offer the most original setting, and it lacks narrative momentum, especially in the first two books. But where it excels is providing characters who are windows into this world. Each has their own perspective and culture. Each feels fully formed. You’ll love and hate them at the same time.
The Stand: My favorite Stephen King novel. King’s work has been probably the largest influence on my genre writing, in general. There isn’t an author whose work I’ve read more of so that makes sense. The Stand is, in my opinion, his magnum opus. I read it during Covid so the story of a world wiped out by a superflu kind of struck a nerve. Despite being a very grim tale, it is also an optimistic and hopeful one. The Tolkein influence is very much present in that sense. It’s also puts a big emphasis on characters’ cosmic alignment in the eternal struggle between good and evil.
Bloodborne: This game perfectly understands cosmic horror and throws you in the deep end. Worry not, you have trick weapons. And guns (for parrying, naturally). Bloodborne was Fromsoftware’s response to shield-turtling in Dark Souls. No more blocking, you gotta get right up in the enemy’s nasty face and taste their blood to stay alive. Bloodborne was my first soulslike. Instantly, I fell in love with its weird setting. This is a city spiralling into madness. It’s the kind of thing Edgar Allen Poe would conjure up in the final stages of his delirium. It makes little effort to explain itself, in modern Fromsoftware tradition, but thats why it works. Cthulhu is a brand now, representing Cosmic Horror ™. The Orphan of Kos still keeps me up at night.
Prey (2016): The best videogame RPG, in my humble opinion, and yet it is rarely categorized in that genre. It’s definitely considered an Immersive Sim, which is weird since no one can agree as to what that even means (much like OSR) but everyone unanimously thinks Prey is one. Prey presents you with a problem and a whole bunch of tools but leaves the solutions up to you. The scenario is a classic: You are on a space station overrun by hostile aliens and have to figure out some way to stop the invasion or get out alive. It’s the kind of open ended gameplay that’s a miracle to achieve in a videogame. The GLOO Cannon might be my favorite videogame gun precisely because it doesn’t deal damage, it creates paths. You can play this game as an action FPS if that’s your vibe but you can also lean into weird alien powers or spec into tech proficiency to avoid combat to outsmart the enemy. The game is not going to tell you how to play it. You make your own solution to this puzzle. It’s layer upon layer of complex systems all intersecting to provide a narratively dense shooter that gives you agency. It’s got some of the best environment and level design in the medium, deep alt-history lore and a banger soundtrack by the incomparable Mick Gordon. If you like smart sci-fi thrillers, check this one out.
Honorable Mention - Copra: I’ve always liked the idea of Suicide Squad more than I’ve enjoyed its various iterations. I think a story focused around D-list superheroes/villains begrudgingly working for the government on secret black ops missions sounds fun as hell. James Gunn’s film came closest to capturing the vibe I was hoping for. But nothing beats Copra, Michel Fiffe’s insane indie comic that asks “What if Suicide Squad was actually good?” This is an honorable mention because in truth I only just started reading it, but holy shit, it is not ok for a single artist to have this much talent. Michel Fiffe’s manic energy bursts off every page. Every panel, even. It reminds me of Lynne Varley and Klaus Janson’s work, while being totally of its own. The stories themselves embrace the absurd and the fantastical, and while the ensemble of characters all feel like echoes of popular superheroes, they all have their unique identity within the series. Better yet, the story is completely centered around them, so there is no obligation to refer to a broader interconnected universe. These characters are given the space to show themselves off. Fiffe is also given the freedom to do what he wants with them. That means they can die. Permanently. And their deaths have meaning. Because no one is gonna resurrect them for a crossover event or reboot. I urge anyone running a superhero themed game to read this series. It’s really special.
That’s it. That’s my list of inspirations I cared to remember today. Hope you feel compelled to check these things out if you haven’t already!