By Epic Fantasy Novels
You have almost certainly spent hundreds of hours inside the worlds that Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance built.
You may never have heard of any of them.
This is the invisible foundation of modern fantasy entertainment. The books that shaped the genre were written mostly between 1930 and 1970. The games, films, and television shows that dominate fantasy culture now were built by people who devoured those books as teenagers. The DNA ran forward. The authors didn’t.
Here’s the chain.
Elden Ring Is Moorcock
FromSoftware’s Elden Ring — 2022, one of the most critically acclaimed games of the decade — is saturated with Michael Moorcock.
Moorcock’s Elric saga, written from 1961 onward, concerns an albino emperor of a dying civilisation who wields a soul-drinking black sword named Stormbringer. The sword has its own will. It craves souls. It kills Elric’s friends. It is both his greatest weapon and his damnation.
The Elden Ring: a sword that demands blood. The corrupted grace that leads you forward. The Erdtree — vast, golden, seemingly benevolent, actually built on a foundation of rot. The recurring FromSoftware theme of an age that should have ended continuing through sheer will, at terrible cost.
Moorcock’s cosmology divides reality between Law and Chaos, with the Balance between them — maintained at great personal cost by Eternal Champions like Elric. The Elden Ring is explicitly a Balance artifact. The Great Rune lore is Moorcock’s multiverse theology in a different costume.
The Tarnished are Eternal Champions. The grace that drives them forward is Moorcock’s Cosmic Balance — compelling its instruments toward purpose they didn’t choose.
Hidetaka Miyazaki has cited European dark fantasy as a primary influence. Moorcock is the spine of European dark fantasy.
Game of Thrones Is Howard and Vance
George R.R. Martin has been explicit about his influences. In interviews over decades, he has named Robert E. Howard and Jack Vance as two of the writers who shaped his approach to fantasy.
The Howard influence is the moral pragmatism. Conan — Howard’s most famous creation — is not a hero in the traditional sense. He’s a thief, a mercenary, a pirate, and eventually a king by his own hand. He lives by a code that is not chivalry: competence is virtue, survival is legitimate, and the strong man who does what he must is more honest than the aristocrat who does what he must and calls it justice.
Martin’s Westeros is built on that foundation. The good don’t win because they’re good. Power goes to the capable and the ruthless. The honourable Eddard Stark — who expects the game to be played by honourable rules — loses everything because of that expectation. That is not cynicism for its own sake. That’s Howard’s understanding of how power actually works, applied at epic scale.
The Vance influence is the worldbuilding texture. Jack Vance was one of the most inventive creators of cultures, languages, and societies in the history of SF/fantasy. His worlds have depth that comes from the edges — the way people talk, the customs that seem arbitrary until you understand them, the food, the insults, the social rituals. The Dying Earth and the Lyonesse trilogy (Vance’s more direct fantasy work) have this quality of a world that has been going on long before you arrived and will continue long after.
Martin’s world feels old in the same way. The history is real because it’s arbitrary and contradictory, the way real history is. The cultures have internal logic that isn’t explained to you. The gods may or may not exist, and nobody knows. This is Vance’s method at epic scale.
The Witcher Is Leiber
Andrzej Sapkowski, the Polish writer who created The Witcher, has discussed his debt to American fantasy — and Fritz Leiber is the template.
Leiber’s Gray Mouser and Fafhrd are two adventurers in the corrupt city of Lankhmar: a nimble thief of ambiguous morality and a large northern barbarian with surprising sensitivity. They’re neither heroes nor villains. They’re professionals in a world that doesn’t reward heroism. They take contracts. They make bad decisions about women. They drink too much. They save each other.
Geralt of Rivia is a Leiber protagonist — the professional monster hunter who operates outside normal society, who has a code but not a cause, who is drawn into political conflicts he wants no part of, who keeps encountering the same cast of flawed people across a series of loosely connected episodes.
The Witcher’s episodic structure — Geralt wanders, takes a contract, encounters a moral problem that has no clean solution, moves on — is Leiber’s structure for the Fafhrd and Mouser stories. Neither Leiber’s heroes nor Geralt ever resolve into conventional heroism. They’re too self-aware, too experienced, too honest about what they’re doing.
Lankhmar is Novigrad. The moral complexity of the monster — sometimes the monster is the victim — is Leiber’s central theme, taken and deepened by Sapkowski.
Dark Souls Is Clark Ashton Smith
This one is less documented — FromSoftware is not as talkative about literary sources as some — but the fingerprints are unmistakable.
Clark Ashton Smith wrote about dying worlds. His Zothique cycle concerns the last continent of a far-future Earth, under an expanded and cooling sun, populated by the ruins of forgotten civilisations and the sorceries of a world that has forgotten science. His Hyperborea cycle is set in a prehistoric ice age of dark gods and doomed heroes. Every setting Smith wrote has one quality: the sense that you are arriving at the end of something vast that you will never fully understand.
Dark Souls’ environmental storytelling — the feeling of exploring the ruins of a civilisation you will never fully understand, where everything that was great has already failed, where the lore emerges from fragments and implications rather than exposition — is Smith’s mode in game form. The item descriptions in Dark Souls that hint at histories you’ll never see in full; the sense that you’re a small figure in a dying cosmology; the beauty of the ruins themselves, gorgeous and lethal at once — this is Smith.
Bloodborne is even more direct. A city built on forbidden knowledge, a cosmos of indifferent entities, beauty that is also horror: this is Zothique and Lovecraft running in parallel, which is itself historically accurate since Smith and Lovecraft were contemporaries and correspondents.
D&D Is All of Them
We’ve covered this elsewhere (see our Appendix N piece), but the summary: Dungeons & Dragons was built by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson as a way to play inside the books they loved. The magic system is Jack Vance’s. The alignment system is Moorcock’s. The thief class is Leiber’s Gray Mouser. The dungeon as adventure space is Howard’s ruins. The moral complexity of the adventurer is Conan.
Every D&D player is living inside Appendix N. Most don’t know it.
Why This Matters
There’s a common assumption that old books are irrelevant — that the modern versions have superseded them, that you can get everything the source material offered from a newer and more sophisticated form.
This is wrong in a specific way.
Elden Ring is extraordinary. But it is building on Moorcock — which means it is adding things (environmental storytelling, mechanical difficulty, visual spectacle) while leaving things out (the full weight of Moorcock’s prose, the specific experience of Elric’s interiority, the philosophical architecture of the Law/Chaos cosmology developed across a dozen novels).
Game of Thrones is extraordinary. But it is building on Howard — which means the Conan stories are doing something different. Howard’s Conan is a shorter, faster, more physically immediate experience. You’re in the action. You feel it in your body. Martin builds worlds; Howard drops you in them.
The source is not better. It’s different. It’s the thing that the later thing is made from — and that relationship goes both ways. Reading Howard makes you understand what Martin kept and what he left behind. Playing Elden Ring makes you want to read Moorcock to find the source of the feeling you couldn’t name.
These authors are not historical curiosities. They are the operating system running underneath the entertainment you love.
Where to Start
From Elden Ring: Read Michael Moorcock — Elric of Melniboné. One short novel. Read it in a weekend. You will recognise everything.
From Game of Thrones: Read Robert E. Howard — start with “The Tower of the Elephant” (free online, under an hour). Then pick up a Vance collection.
From The Witcher: Read Fritz Leiber — Swords and Deviltry is the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser collection. Two adventurers, one city, moral complexity handled with wit and warmth.
From Dark Souls/Bloodborne: Read Clark Ashton Smith — start with “The Dark Eidolon” or “Xeethra.” Available free online. You will feel the atmosphere immediately.
From D&D: Read any of the above. All of them are in Appendix N. Any door into this tradition is the right door.
The authors listed here wrote mostly in the 1930s–1970s. Most of their work is available cheaply or free. None of it requires specialised knowledge to enjoy — just the willingness to meet stories on their own terms.
