I play roleplaying games: Dungeons and Dragons, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu and the like.

I run them for my friends. I’ve been doing so for over 30 years, the last 20 or so in a comfortable routine every Wednesday night for the same group of ex-college-housemates who are my closest friends. The house move has scuppered that, so we’re trying to reconstruct as a roleplaying game every couple of months for a whole weekend. This weekend will be the first.

I should go into a long song and dance about how great roleplaying games are. They’ve certainly been great fun for me. But the main thing they did was introduce me to storytelling for other people, at a very early age. My photography and film-making are informed and motivated by the same inspirations and mental images that I draw on to write games for my friends.

Have you ever wondered why Restrained Elegance has stories about captured djinni’s and efreeti, slavegirls of the wicked baron, viking maidens, nature spirits and bondage pleasure robots? It’s me playing with the same mythologies, settings and story ideas that I enjoy exploring (in a non-kinky context) with my friends around the games table.

I like telling stories and it comes as naturally to me to construct tales about a family of vikings cast adrift into the deep under dark trying to find their way back to the surface as to write sexy stories about tied up Medieval maidens or slavegirls in fantasy Arabian nights.

The kinky and non-kinky facets have bounced off against each other for years. Can you imagine what might have caught my eye about this book when I saw it age about 12 in a bookstore in the magical far-off land of Canada on a super-exciting family holiday?

Recently there’s been a movement called the “Old School Renaissance” where a bunch of 40-somethings like me try to recreate the excitement and limitless possibilities that the early roleplaying games offered. Many quote as their inspiration Gary Gygax’s Appendix N from that weighty tome, the Dungeon Master’s guide (WHAT a title! No wonder it spurred my interest, especially paired with that picture!

I’ve read a lot of the Appendix N authors. Many have a whimsical, arbitrary quality to their worlds which I find as annoying in their writing as I did in the early D&D modules which drew heavily on them. So I thought I’d offer up my own Appendix N replacement for books and other works of art which have inspired me over the years.

And thank them all for making such evocative work.

The black and white illustrations from old-school Dungeons and Dragons. Scantily clad warrior maidens, impossibly beautiful elf princesses, virgin sacrifices… artists like Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, Jeff Easley, Jim Roslof and Liz Danforth evoke whole world and civilisations with a few lines of the pen. A picture is worth a thousand words. If I could draw like that, I wouldn’t need a camera.

The gorgeous colour artwork of their successors, especially the artists who worked on Dragonlance like Clyde Caldwell, Larry Elmore, et al. The pictures are often nonsensical from a “protect your vulnerable bits from harm” point of view, but oh so glamorous. And even the strong maidens I wanted to to tie up 🙂 Simultaneously, their world builds and portrayal of landscapes motivated me to get out in the mountains and write stories set in abandoned keeps or next to ice fjords, not just in domestic or modern settings.

Leaving the visual arts for the written, I’ll include just two things from Gygax’s original appendix N: Tolkien (more The Hobbit than The Lord of The Rings for me), Zelazny’s Amber series. Conan I find more inspiration from the films and pulp illustrations than the original fiction, and Call of Cthulhu makes an excellent game but I find Lovecraft a bit dry to read for fun.

To Gygax’s list of authors I’d add Glen Cook, Mary Gentle, Iain M. Banks, Guy Gavriel Kay, J. K. Rowling and Jonathon Stroud. I can’t think of a bad book by any of them, and all of them have the knack of making the most fantastic settings make sense by viewing them as logical worlds populated by people who feel real.

If you want to take away my top tips I’d say go read The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose, Tigana, Golden Witchbreed, Excession and The Screaming Staircase. And if you haven’t read or watched Harry Potter yet there’s no hope for you 🙂

David Brin’s a marvel, but I’m not always enough of a grown-up to feel up to tackling one of his books.

David Eddings does good character and banter (although the plots are by the numbers loony epic fantasy). Raymond Chandler has the best “sting” in his use of language, and I wish I could crack that wise. Barry Hughart’s three lonely, lovely books set in ancient china are a joy and I wish he’d write more. Julian May’s sprawling Saga of the Exiles has some sparkling imagery and finally treats immortality with a proper appreciation for Geological timescales; I love its scope.

Tim Powers has three crackers and a bunch of also rans. If you haven’t read The Stress of Her Regard, The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides you really should. Colleen McCullough brings ancient Rome to life. Walter Jon Williams’ Drake Majistral books are a hoot, and share with many of my favourite books economy of evocation and damn-the-horses let’s get on with the story pacing. Whilst still immersing you in the world and portraying vivid characters. Love them.

It would be remiss not to mention the more classical allusions: The Prose and Poetic Edda, Njal’s Saga, et al.. As a Welshman I wish I could include the Mabinogion but the combination of whimsy and Christian evangelism leaves me desperate to get back to good old blood, thunder and Thor.

Comics I came to a bit late, although 2000 AD has a special place in my heart for pointing out how much I liked cleanliness of execution in art (Brian Bolland’s pictures of Judge Anderson, for example)

Films and TV had a big impact on me too, but I think at a shallower level than traditional art and the written word. I’d certainly be thrilled to ever produce anything with a hint of Star Wars, The Evil Dead, Conan the Barbarian, Sin City, Mr. Vampire, Alien, a decent Pixar or a good scary Dr. Who story. But maybe because I do film-making for a living some of the time, I think cinema has lost much of its emotional oomph for me.

(It was Conan the Barbarian that had the biggest impact on me, both visually and in terms of sexiness, much more so than the more oft-commented-upon Princess Leia slavegirl outfit. In terms of damsel in distress peril, it was hard to fault Sarah Jane Smith in Dr. Who. Feisty, independent, intelligent but also frequently getting herself tied up and tortured. Win.)

Conversely, I can’t make music at all, but love it. So some of the most visually evocative things for me are pieces of music. I don’t think my storytelling would conjure the same mental images without Beethoven’s sixth, the soundtrack to Conan The Barbarian, Echoes or (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Funny where we get ideas from. Even thinking of the title of that Blue Oyster Cult song brings to mind sparkling expanses of the California High Desert at sunset – and I don’t know why, the band were from New York! It’d not even really there in their album covers, although they have elements of it.

Oh, and I’m convinced Debby Harry was the model for Judge Anderson.

Anyway, that’s been a disconnected ramble through a few of the artists who’ve kicked me into getting off my backside and actually writing or drawing or shooting or filming or running a game over the years. Our fondest hope is that maybe our work will provide inspiration to someone, somewhere who might never have thought how sexy or interesting a barefoot girl nude or dressed in a satin gown, handcuffed by the side of a Norwegian Fjord might look. Maybe someday we will.

Whose work has kindled the spark in your own creative work?