Appendix N is the clearest map of where D&D's spells, monsters and moods came from: pulp sword-and-sorcery, weird fiction and planetary romance more than Tolkien. It shaped the fantasy canon of gamers for decades and became the rallying point of the Old-School Renaissance.
What happened
When TSR published the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide in August 1979, the book ran to more than two hundred dense pages of combat tables, treasure generation and Gary Gygax's opinions. Near the back, among appendices on random dungeon generation and random monster encounters, sat a single page headed "Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading." It was a bibliography of the fiction Gygax believed a Dungeon Master should know.
The list is alphabetical and idiosyncratic, naming 28 authors. Some are cited by specific books, some by series, some with a bare name:
- Poul Anderson: Three Hearts and Three Lions, The High Crusade, The Broken Sword
- John Bellairs: The Face in the Frost
- Leigh Brackett; Fredric Brown
- Edgar Rice Burroughs: the Pellucidar, Mars and Venus series
- Lin Carter: the World's End series
- L. Sprague de Camp: Lest Darkness Fall, The Fallible Fiend; with Fletcher Pratt, the Harold Shea series and The Carnelian Cube
- August Derleth; Lord Dunsany
- Philip José Farmer: the World of Tiers series
- Gardner Fox: the Kothar and Kyrik series
- Robert E. Howard: the Conan series
- Sterling Lanier: Hiero's Journey
- Fritz Leiber: the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series
- H. P. Lovecraft
- A. Merritt: Creep, Shadow, Creep, The Moon Pool, Dwellers in the Mirage
- Michael Moorcock: Stormbringer, Stealer of Souls, the Hawkmoon series (especially the first three books)
- Andre Norton
- Andrew J. Offutt, as editor of Swords Against Darkness III
- Fletcher Pratt: The Blue Star
- Fred Saberhagen: Changeling Earth
- Margaret St. Clair: The Shadow People, Sign of the Labrys
- J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit and the "Ring Trilogy"
- Jack Vance: The Eyes of the Overworld, The Dying Earth
- Stanley Weinbaum; Manly Wade Wellman; Jack Williamson
- Roger Zelazny: Jack of Shadows and the Amber series
Gygax added that "the most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt."
Why it mattered
The list explains a great deal about the game. From Jack Vance's Dying Earth came the rule that wizards memorize spells and forget them on casting, the system players still call Vancian magic; Vance also allowed TSR to use his ioun stones in exchange for the credit. From Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions and Michael Moorcock's Elric stories came the cosmic struggle of Law and Chaos behind D&D's Alignment, and Anderson's troll and paladin left their marks too. Robert E. Howard's Conan and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser supplied the mercenary, tomb-robbing ethos of the early The party. Margaret St. Clair's underground labyrinths and Merritt's hidden races are often cited as ancestors of the multilevel dungeon and the subterranean drow.
Just as revealing is what the list plays down. Tolkien is present, and hobbits, orcs, ents and rangers were in the game from the start, but Gygax insisted his influence was minimal. And Clark Ashton Smith, whose Weird Tales stories of Zothique seem made for dungeon crawling, is missing entirely; Gygax later called that an omission. Appendix N describes a fantasy that is pulpy, amoral and often science-fictional, with Burroughs's Mars, Brackett's planetary romances and Lanier's post-apocalyptic Hiero's Journey sitting beside the swordsmen. It is the fantasy of the 1930s–1970s magazines and paperbacks (see Pulps, Weird Tales & Sword-and-Sorcery and The Paperback Boom & the Counterculture), before epic fantasy in Tolkien's mold dominated the shelves.
Legacy
For players who came to fantasy through the game, Appendix N worked as a treasure map to authors who were often long out of print, and it quietly defined a gamer's canon of Sword & Sorcery and Dying Earth fiction.
In the 2000s the list found a second life. The Old-School Renaissance (OSR) adopted it as a manifesto for recovering the strangeness of early D&D, and Joseph Goodman read every book on it while designing Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics (2012), whose adventures openly riff on Burroughs, Leiber and Vance. Bloggers and podcasts have worked through the list title by title. Wizards of the Coast acknowledged the tradition with "Appendix E: Inspirational Reading" in the 2014 fifth-edition Player's Handbook, a revised and expanded descendant of Gygax's page.
Today "Appendix N" is also shorthand for an aesthetic: gonzo, weird, pre-Tolkienian fantasy where a wizard's spells and a barbarian's greed matter more than prophecy. Few bibliographies have had such an afterlife.
Marginalia
- Appendix N appeared in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, published by TSR in August 1979 and written by Gary Gygax.
- Gygax named six authors as "the most immediate influences upon AD&D": de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt.
- The list names 28 authors, from Leigh Brackett to Roger Zelazny, arranged alphabetically.
- Clark Ashton Smith does not appear; Gygax later acknowledged the omission.
- Jack Vance let Gygax use his ioun stones as a magic item on condition that his books were credited, and the Vancian spell system is named after him.
- Margaret St. Clair's Sign of the Labrys, with its multilevel underground complex, is often cited as a model for the dungeon itself.
- A revised list, "Appendix E: Inspirational Reading," appears in the 2014 fifth-edition Player's Handbook.
Quick answers
- What was Appendix N?
- A one-page reading list at the back of the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, "Inspirational and Educational Reading," turned out to be the family tree of Dungeons & Dragons, and a syllabus for everyone who followed.
- When did Appendix N happen?
- 1979.
- Why did Appendix N matter?
- Appendix N is the clearest map of where D&D's spells, monsters and moods came from: pulp sword-and-sorcery, weird fiction and planetary romance more than Tolkien. It shaped the fantasy canon of gamers for decades and became the rallying point of the Old-School Renaissance.
