Appendix N à la Crow
Jumping on the bandwagon a day late and a dollar short, as is my usual workflow. Below is a quick Big Three of my RPG influences.
The Exile Series, Spiderweb Software (1995, Windows)
Exile III was probably my first favorite game. These were later remade as Avernum, which plays nicer on modern machines, Exile is what I look back on most fondly. At the farm, we had one of those 1000 Games CDs from Staples, brimming with shareware. These were generally not curated at all and filled with garbage, but there were some greats in there.
I was immediately ensorcelled by Exile III. It pulled me in with tales of undesirables banished to an underground penal colony and their struggles to survive, followed by their tentative return to the surface as the power of their oppressor waned. The graphics were colorful but spare and the sound was nonexistent, but there was a solid ruleset and massive campaign. The continent of Valorim still feels gigantic and daunting to me now.
Naturally, I quickly ran up against the limits of the shareware edition. I made my mother call Jeff Vogel at Spiderweb Software to ask how an eight year old could buy the game, to which he replied a mailed check would be fine. I set about writing a letter, explaining that I was Crow, aged 8, and I needed to purchase the game please so that my band of intrepids could meet their destiny. Gallant Jeff sent me a package back containing disk and some other goodies, including a booklet I still have. I strive to emulate Jeff’s enthusiasm and craft.
Irish Mythology (sands of time, human folkloric tradition)
Cú Chulainn in warp spasm, lashing himself to a standing stone to die on his feet. Fionn mac Cumhaill burning his thumb on the fish of knowledge. The shapeshifting púca. I grew up with a little collection of Irish myths and legends on my bedside table, so these stories have always had a foggy and on-the-threshold-of-dreams vibe to me. The images have always been so clear and strange in my mind and did a lot to shape my early imaginings of the fantastic. I was also fascinated and haunted by the jump from the prehistoric oral tradition to the written records of Christian scribes—realizing that what I was reading was full of blank spaces and was very much filtered through the ages was a formative experience for me as a reader.
Holy Diver, Ronnie James Dio (1983, music video)
I played a lot of D&D 3.x in college at a grimy ass punk house called Dresden, coined by a dude I had a crush on who lived there and was super into Kurt Vonnegut. To this day I think I have rose tinted glasses for 3.x because of how masterfully the DM managed those games; he kept it simple and badass, articulating his very trad world to us through beer-soaked headbanger languages. Six diesel dudes in brutal black armor raise morningstars against you… What I remember most about those games was how the DM focused on the fundamentals and made sure we were there to fuckin delve. We listened to a ton of metal during these games, especially The Sword, Summoning, Electric Wizard, etc, but Holy Diver was our national anthem.
Holy Diver cuts to the heart of why I fuckin game… sometimes you just gotta walk through a mysterious wood, slay a fucked up dude in a church with your sword, get a new sword from another fucked up dude, then go to an evil altar and see a priest with freaky eyes. It fuckin rocks dude. It's so fuckin sick. Ride the tiger. That's what I want out of an elfgame.