Appendix N

An excellent example of this appeared in 1979 with the Dungeon & Dragons role-playing game. That year, Gary Gygax, who created this game, put out The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. This was written to help those who run D&D games, called dungeon masters.

The work contained several appendices, but the one we are interested in is Appendix N. Or to use its full title: “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading.”

This appendix listed authors and works that were an inspiration to Gygax in the development of D&D. A revised and expanded version would later appear as “Appendix E: Inspirational Reading” in the D&D fifth edition Player’s Handbook in 2014.

This appendix has become so well known that I know of two books out there devoted to it that reprint several representative works. We’ll look at one of them here.

But what does Appendix N contain? It has the following:

• Poul Anderson: Three Hearts and Three Lions, The High Crusade, and The Broken Sword
• John Bellairs: The Face in the Frost
• Leigh Brackett
• Fredric Brown
• Edgar Rice Burroughs: Pellucidar series, Barsoom series, and Venus series
• Lin Carter: World’s End series
• L. Sprague de Camp: Lest Darkness Fall, The Fallible Fiend, et al.
• Fletcher Pratt: Blue Star, et al.
• De Camp and Pratt: The Carnelian Cube and the Harold Shea series
• August Derleth
• Lord Dunsany
• Philip José Farmer: The World of the Tiers series, et al.
• Gardner Fox: the Kothar series, the Kyrik series, et al.
• Robert E. Howard: the Conan series
• Sterling Lanier: Hiero’s Journey
• Fritz Leiber: the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, et al.
• H.P. Lovecraft
• A. Merritt: Creep, Shadow, Creep, The Moon Pool, Dwellers in The Mirage, et al.
• Michael Moorcock: Stormbringer, Stealer of Souls, the Hawkmoon series (especially the first three books)
• Andre Norton
• Andrew J. Offutt: editor of Swords Against Darkness III
• Fred Saberhagen: Changeling Earth, et al.
• Margaret St. Clair: The Shadow People, Sign of the Labrys
• Clark Ashton Smith [left out of the original list, but Gygax said he should have been included]
• J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit; the Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Jack Vance: The Eyes of the Overworld, The Dying Earth, et al.
• Stanley Weinbaum
• Manly Wade Wellman
• Jack Williamson
• Roger Zelazny: Jack of Shadows, the Amber series, et al.

Looking at this list, you see several pulp authors (REH, HPL, CAS, ERB, along with Stanley Weinbaum, August Derleth), as well as post-pulp authors who were clearly inspired by the pulps. Several I have reviewed here, and others I hope to get to. Some day.

There are some books devoted to Appendix N. One I looked at is Appendix N: Weird Tales From the Roots of Dungeons and Dragons edited by Peter Bebergal. I got the recent “revised and enlarged edition” from Strange Attractor Press, published in 2024. (The previous edition came out in 2020 and was about 50 pages shorter.)

It’s a handsome edition, with nice endpapers even in the paperback edition. There is a nice introduction by the editor going over all the works. Then we get 18 stories and two comic book stories. All the stories are representatives of the various authors and works from Appendix N. I thought the editor did a great job of selecting these works.

Even if you aren’t interested in Dungeon & Dragons, this is still a great collection of pulp and post-pulp fantasy adventure stories. It can serve as a great introduction to many of these authors.

Going forward, I plan on adding “Appendix N” as a tag to appropriate posts here.