Appendix S
Introduction
Since others are making their own Appendices N, so will I, so that you may know what has inspired me to make the things I make. The list will be incomplete and fragmentary, with some inspirations that will only come to fruition in the future. I can not manage to place everything that made me who I am here, so there'll be just a small part of it here. All the things given are inspiring, however. They are the things I first think of when I think of what made me into me; there are probably more. I hope that you'll like them.
Some Sources of My Inspiration
Books
The Discworld series - the books on which I grew up. Anything by Sir Terry Pratchett was a great influence (and I read both the Discworld series together with all of the short stories and The Science of Discworld, as well as a lot of other works of Sir Terry). They taught me kindness, joy, and a healthy dose of skepticism towards the other people. They also taught me to subvert expectations and parody things in a sincere way, without any foul play. They made me human and kept me alive through mental health issues.
The Xeelee Sequence - Stephen Baxter has shown me new horizons of what is possible with deep time and unimaginable scale.
How To Win Friends And Influence People - while Carnegie was a hack, his principles were solid, and understanding what makes people tick is important to get them to do what you want. I give each of my NPCs motivations which (if you help them fulfill them) will let you get them on your side. It's much easier to make something work in your game when you know how it works.
The Autumn of the Middle Ages - a horribly powerful book, it can easily defeat you. If you triumph over Johan Huizinga, however, in return he gives you an intimate knowledge of the mind of the people living in the western world during the Late Middle Ages, one that can make your players shit themselves to death with delight when they learn it themselves. Or cholera, they can also shit themselves to death with cholera.
Fables for Robots and The Cyberiad - I read this book by Stanisław Lem back when I was a little child. It filled me with joy and glee and an appreciation for the future and what it may bring, as well as with a love for philosophy which I can not shake. Now that we are closer to becoming machines while machines are getting closer to us, these are the kinds of fables that we should read to our children.
The Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin cooked with this one, no cap. A book about how language and how we define things, as well as about thinking out of the box about them. It helped me build up my linguistic intelligence, and understand how the words affect the world.
All the various popular science books I have read as a child - there are way too many to count, I do not remember them any more. I would just consume them by dozen, consumed in turn by the love of the surrounding world and how curious it is. They make me want to research anything I put in my worlds, so that they may bring knowledge as well as joy.
Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto - cause Karl Marx's writing is fire, and it helps me design societies for the worlds I create. I always start with a general idea, then run it through a few moments of material analysis to see where such a society would end up. It's fun and helps you create realistic groups.
House of Leaves - I still haven't completely understood it; I don't think I ever will. The madness and the gaslighting, the unreliable narrator. In my conspiracy or lovecraftian games, this is the voice I use.
TTRPGs
Mage The Ascension - the system that made me realise that everything is possible and that freeform anything is great in TTRPGs. It also made me into an occultist, of sorts, which sometimes shows up in my work.
The GLOG, in all of its forms - after all, there's something liberating in an open source TTRPG. An actual folk art, I am a practicioner of. Thank you, you all.
Wolves Upon The Coast - Luke Gearing's magnificent crawl, it changed how I see magic in TTRPGs, as well as cementing my love of advancement that happens inside the world of the game. Luke Gearing's other works are also an influence on me (especially his Against Incentive, a post that informs my design and the incongruities of what grants XP or other forms of progression in my games).
Legacy: Life Among The Ruins - a PbtA game that is based around Domain Play, it is a thing that taught me that PbtA-style moves may be well-executed, and that sometimes it is better to make a bad move for some extra drama (in-character, of course).
Ultraviolet Grasslands - they introduced me to how to make a good pointcrawl, as well as how to vibes can be made into gameable material. Also, the art is majestic and shows up regularly in my descriptions. The sheer zaniness of the shown world is lovely and also makes me revisit it regularly.
Movies And Series
Hateful Eight - it has informed me how I make characters in any socially-adjacent situation. I give them past baggage, so that there is a high likelyhood of them coming into conflict, when pushed by the players.
Gravity Falls - I have never lived in a small town. Gravity Falls helped me understand just a bit of it, as well as placing a love of conspiracies and mysteries in the fiction I read and make in me.
Homestuck - I read it recently and it is burned into my soul and I have now picked up playing piano and feel a strong urge to slather my body in grey paint and make creative things. It instills a certain obsessiveness in a perosn. It is the good kind. It's hard to read, Hussie is a bit of a dick about his writing, but underneath there is a lightning in a bottle.
Video Games
Undertale - back when I was a child, I loved this game, even if I never got into the fandom in a creative way it gave me some parts of my personality (my love of puns and noticing them in the surrounding world, as well as nourishing my belief that most things can be solved by other means than violence (even if there are cases when it is needed)).
Deltarune - another creation of Toby Fox, it made me realise just how important fantasy is. Toby Fox has a great skill in making you feel like you have reached a place where you shouldn't be, and the dread related to it. There is also an important quote on sincerity in there which I'll put up here "Doubt. Fear. That’s what poisons your story. That, and too much predictability."
Disco Elysium - something that shows me that even in the darkest times, the stars should not go out. The different parts of the soul have entered my TTRPG narrations and they will be there until I stop GMing (which will be shortly before I die); now it is not just the GM who talks to you and describes your surroundings, but your traits and skills. It's your business acumen pointing out the probable price of this painting, or your to-hit bonus talking about the gap in your foe's defense.
Rimworld - a game without any in-built story, instead generating your own. Loving to see how my little people interact in this world made me like to create sandboxes for my players.
Celeste - a game that made me know that I shouldn't give up and that I'm capable of more than I realize. It had a genuine positive effect on my anxiety, which is incredible for a motherfucking video game.
Hollow Knight - the worldbuilding is immaculate, oozing into the worlds I create through strangest ways. The style of it, the darkness and the light, they enter my descriptions and crawl through the back of my mind.
Fallen London - the game that taught me English (as it is a text-based browser game with an energy system that rewards playing it regularly). I was just a little kid (like, 5th grade primary school) when I got into it, and it sucked me in deep. The world's melancholy combined with humour to make sense of it all is great in getting through the darker days.
Oneshot - it made me love interactions between the player and the world that are shown in the world of the game. Little things outside the world that affect it. It is also why I tend to encourage my players to do a little meta-gaming, as well as why I love stories about breaking out of various bounds.
Cultist Simulator (and the rest of the Secret Histories) - they make me put a lot of little exceptions and strange rules in my cosmologies, making them more organic than most are. One day I'll reimagine planescape (as I loved it as a child, it scratches the autistic urge to classify everything).
Music
Jacek Kaczmarski's Work - all of it. He was a Polish poet/songwriter/bard/dissident/wifebeater. He has created music with an incredible soul, especially when it talks about more transcendental than immediate matters (like in his "Raj" album).
Tolkien's Songs - performed by Clamavi De Profundis. Especially Durin's Song. They just awaken something in my soul much greater than the usual music that I encounter. They place me in other worlds, which is useful when writing.
Rachmaninoff's Pieces - the tension of his pieces is immacculate, showing me well that all creativity is really love-making (through its initiation, build-up, then release and going down to the baseline again).
LAIBACH - the harsh sounds hiding harmonies, the totalitarian aesthetic hiding a message of love, darkness hiding the light. This is the music of the new world that is being born. Laibach shows us what we really are, under all the declarations of human rights and under all the laws and consitution. The remind us about how the hierarchies persist and of the power and threat that remain.
Post Scriptum
It is hard to remember all the pieces that make you who you are.