Explorers Design's Appendix N

Late to the bandwagon. Just in time to talk about books, movies, and games.

Clayton Notestine

Clayton Notestine

— 10 min read
Overlapping circles representing influences come together to create new colors. Title: Exploers Design's Appendix N.

Inspiration. What is it good for?

I promise I have other things to say, but being original is just cobbling together different inspirations. All good art, movies, books, and games—are just pieces of other things smashed together until something "new" and "novel" remains. It's kludging, hacking, and collage. A raw and unpretentious affair that looks unoriginal and arbitrary without seeing the final results.

This is why my favorite authors, designers, and people are avid readers, travelers, and movie watchers. It's also why they tend to be eccentric and weird. The more obscure and unexpected the ingredients, the more interesting the final work. I like to think I have some eccentric and weird inspirations.

🧭
An Explorers Design Update. I've been on a long break since attending Gen Con. A mixture of things have kept me from my hobbies including a lot of international travel and work. It turns out airports, good weather, and client calls don't bolster my creativity.

Things coming up for Explorers Design:
- The 12th issue of The Explorateur (My 1-year annniversary)
- A debrief/post-mortem on the Ennie Awards
- Some manifestos about design
- Insights from designing an adventure for the Appendix N jam

What is an Appendix N?

Back when Gary Gygax wrote AD&D, he had way too many appendices in the Dungeon Master's Guide. He had enough to reach "N" which maybe says a lot about how D&D was designed like a meatball.

But I digress, the Appendix N was his list of influences on D&D, which were mostly pulp fantasy and planetary romance novels. The kind of thing a midwesterner in the 70s would be into—Conan the Barbarian, Jack Vance novels, vikings with horns on their helmets—the usual.

Everyone has their own "Appendix N" and when you see them, you learn a lot about how their work came to exist. George Lucas, for example, was heavily influenced by pulp serials, Westerns, Japanese film, and the Vietnam War. If you squint at Star Wars (or just stare at it a little bit), you see all of those influences.

This post is in response to Prismatic Wasteland's Blog Bandwagon. It's my list of inspirations. If you want to see other people's lists, check out the post below.

Bandwagon Roundup: The Appendices Ns
Over 69 (!) bloggers came together for the largest bandwagon of the year and I round them all up for your perusal
Prismatic WeeklyPrismatic Wasteland

Influential Books

  • Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross Sections. History was (and still is) my special interest, and Stephen Biesty's "Castle" and "Man-of-War" were the foundational texts of my childhood. I'm still chasing this aesthetic.
  • National Geographic Magazine. I'm talking about the old ones. The kind with ads that are either hokey, defunct, or banned. What the old magazines lacked in tastes and accuracy, they made up for with wonder and curiosity.
  • Black Mask Magazine. There was a pile of reprints and "best of" volumes in the dugout of my childhood little league—mouldering in a cubby alongside Weird Science, Archie, Prince Valiant, and crumpled Big League Chew bags.
  • The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. The earlier the edition, the better. I remember reading this as a kid and being fixated on the trolls, goblins, and drunk elves. So many songs! To this day, I prefer The Hobbit to LotR.
  • Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I read this book too young and never recovered from it. It changed my sense of humor and warped how I read "travelogues" and "encyclopedias," which this series effectively is.
  • Raymond Chandler Novels. Raymond Chandler's politics and racism belong in the dust bin, but his prose and use of metaphor still sticks to me. No one describes a character and their actions like Chandler. Read The Big Sleep.

Influential Shows

  • Courage the Cowardly Dog. I grew up watching this show as a kid. I always associated it with my life in the American midwest and the Midwest Gothic genre. It was great training for horror rpgs. Watch The Tower of Dr. Zalost.
  • Dexter's Laboratory. This is a kids show with the same pulp influences as D&D, with the game being an influence as well. It also might be the first time I saw D&D depicted on screen. That episode is called D & DD.
  • The Twilight Zone. Old episodes used to scratch their way into my house via antenna. To this day, the monologues of Rod Sterling remain one of those itches I can't scratch with roleplaying games. Watch Walking Distance.
  • Star Trek the Next Generation. I've reskinned many a TNG episode, character, and premise for my sci-fi adventures. The silly but philosophical morality plays feel aspirational but attainable. Watch The Inner Light.
  • Doctor Who. Similar to Twilight Zone and TNG, Doctor Who has high concept monsters, weird settings, and a dandy trampsing through it. I recommend watching the episode Forest of the Dead.
  • Mad Men. It's a brutal show with characters who are actively torching or losing grip with their own lives. It's also chock full of texture, visuals, and witticisms few can contend with. Just watch from the beginning.

Influential Movies

  • Raiders of the Lost Ark. I love pulp adventures. I can't get enough of them. Raiders of the Lost Ark, for all of its aging ills, still fills me with exhilaration. The cast of characters and sense of framing still impact my rpg sessions.
  • Sweet Smell of Success. This black and white noir has dialogue so sharp, it'll give you a fresh shave. I love the sleazy, hectic New York in this and regularly recreate it in all my depictions of cities for Call of Cthulhu.
  • Goodfellas. It's my second favorite movie of all time. I can't pin how it would have influenced me, but it's been in my life for so long, it must have permeated everything. I suspect my villains and player characters have shared DNA.
  • Le Samouraï. There has never been a cooler, colder, more competent killer than Alain Delon's Jef—an assassin with a code, trench coat, and hat. Seriously. Watch this movie. I love the look and feel of it. A visual design influence for me.
  • Snowpiercer. Some will say Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer is too overt. Those people are cowards. Snowpiercer is what every fantasy, sci-fi should aspire to—high-concept, hyper-focused, and high-stakes. It rules.
  • 12 Angry Men. This is my all-time favorite movie. It informed my tastes in characterization, dialogue, and settings (keep them claustrophobic). I also really like how earnest it is—characters are big archetypes—and that's good.

Influential Games

  • Spirit of the Century. My first Fate game. It snuck into my life through the pulp fantasy angle and quickly cultivated my head with the allure of "aspects" in character design. I still think, despite everything, it's the best Fate game.
  • Pendragon. I played in a campaign of Pendragon with three generations of knights, and I've been chasing that feeling ever since. It also introduced me to one of my favorite designers, Greg Stafford, who built worlds better than most.
  • Disco Elysium. A video game with some of the best writing ever. I love the mechanics, themes, characters, and everything else about Disco Elysium. When I need inspiration for anything, I go read some quotations from it.
  • Euro-style board games. I'm cheating here by listing a genre. Agricola, Terraforming Mars, Carcassonne, etc, etc. Modern board games changed how I think about design, and gave me an itch to push little wooden cubes.
  • Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition. I loved the game. The rulebook, on the other hand, was so bad it made me question layout in rpgs. I think that was the first time I really clocked layout in a negative way—marring something I liked.
  • Age of Empires II. What can I say? I like moving soldiers on a big board like Napoleon. This version and the original also used to come with thick little instruction manuals that were as fun for history nerds as video gamers.

Influential People

  • Josef Müller-Brockman. A Swiss graphic designer, author, and educator, Josef's book Grid Systems is what turned me on to layout and the grid. It's also the work that led me to design and advertising in general.
  • Dieter Rams. A product designer from the 60s and 70s. Dieter Rams' 10 principles for good design informed my design tastes which have mutated after coming in contact with roleplaying games.
  • Jonathan Gold. He was a food and music critic out of LA. He had this really powerful way of describing things that came with a pace and rhythm I wish I could replicate on this blog. One of the greatest critics of all time.
  • Bill Bernbach. Back in the 1960s, Bill Bernbach reinvented branding, design, and advertising by pairing copywriters and art directors together. His innovation and work created the bridge my career lives on.
  • Vlaada Chvátil. The board game designer of Galaxy Truckers, Codenames, and Tash-Kalar. I've played a lot of board games, but those broke my brain and made me think of game design very differently from when I started.
  • Werner Herzog. The man is more myth than reality, and I know that, yet I've totally bought into his ideas of adequate images and ecstatic truth. His autobiography is also the wildest listen you can subject yourself to.

Influential Music

Influential Misc

  • BBC's Historical Farm Series. Surprisingly, my love of history doesn't include wars, battles, or soldiers. This series from the BBC is all about the life and work of Tudor, Victorian, etc. farmers with some historians recreating it.
  • Rustbelt Americana. I'm from America's "rustbelt" a region that used to be prosperous and now resembles Gotham. It has given me a love and reverence for lore, factories, art deco architecture, crumbling brick, patina, and baseball.
  • Train Car Diners. America is still dotted with these old-school diners made from decommissioned train cars. They're the closest thing we have to time machines in the States. Palace Diner in Biddeford, Maine is my favorite.
  • Car Factories. Hell on Earth is working second shift at an American car factory with no seniority in the UAW. There's a lot I take from my short stint working there: the dungeon-like ovens, the people, and the noise.
  • Lake Erie. The lake, which is the size of an inland sea, is a Lazarus-like corpse. Back in the 1970s, it was effectively dead. We killed it. And then, with its pollution, it slowly killed everyone—a lot of my family included. Righteous.
  • Roman Catholicism. I was raised in a Irish and Italian Catholic community and while I renounce the faith, I still think stain glass windows, statues, rituals, and a pipe organ are the coolest, most awe-inducing things there are.

What can we do with influences?

Make stuff, inspire others, and explain work without actually explaining it. Here's my challenge: next time you make a game or long-ish adventure: make a list of influences for that project. Specific influences are more interesting than broad ones, and in the future, I'll make sure to append a curated list to my work as well.

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