Classics Appendix N

In the original Appendix N, and in personal appendixes N from various OSR blogs, contemporary and modern fantastic literature dominates the reading list. Given the selection you'll find in a bookstore's fantasy section, that's not surprising, but I wonder what an Appendix N would include if limited to pre-1900 literature?

• Arabian Nights
• Beowulf
• Voltaire's Candide
• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• Cervantes' Don Quixote
• Stoker's Dracula
• Grimm's Fairy Tales
• Spenser's Faerie Queen
• Goethe's Faust
• Gilgamesh
• Machen's The Great God Pan
• Swift's Gulliver's Travels
• Homer's Iliad
• Dante's Inferno
• Ovid's Metamorphoses
• Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur
• Homer's Odyssey
• Edgar Allan Poe's short stories
• Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen
• The Song of Roland
• Stevenson's Treasure Island

A D&D campaign drawn from this Appendix N would have a distinctive flavor, although you could find a basis for many of the traditional D&D tropes in those pages.

Just arrived!

UPDATE: jacket design by Edward Gorey.

The Book of Imaginary Beings

Despite the fact that Jorge Luis Borges is one of my favorite writers, I had only briefly flipped through The Book of Imaginary Being at the library. I recently noticed that Borges' bestiary appears on the inspirational source material list at the back of the Moldvay basic book, so I grabbed a copy to see what material could be appropriated for gaming. The book contains over a hundred entries for monsters, each entry 1-2 pages. For a quick bit of general inspiration, pull it off the shelf and read two or three entries at random. There are also many specific details that could profitably be stolen for your games. I found these, for example, in three random entries:

• the shaft of a griffon's feather makes a marvelous bow
• angry villagers who slay a monster might have it taxidermied and prominently displayed to visitors
• the dots on tortoise shells are treatises about the cosmos

If you've never read any of Borges' fiction, I strongly recommend it. His stuff isn't strictly fantasy, but it certainly falls under the heading "literature of the fantastic". Start either with the Everyman's Library edition of Ficciones or one of the out-of-print Giovanni translations. Unfortunately, the widely available Andrew Hurley translations are discouragingly stilted.