By Epic Fantasy Novels
In 1979, Gary Gygax published the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide — the bible of the game that created modern tabletop roleplaying. It was 240 pages of rules, tables, random encounter charts, and world-building guidance.
At the very back, in a short appendix marked simply “N,” Gygax listed the books that had inspired the game. Not as footnotes. Not as scholarly citations. As a reading list for dungeon masters who wanted to understand, at a deeper level, what the game was trying to be.
Appendix N is one of the most important documents in fantasy history. It’s also almost entirely unread.
The authors on that list — Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, Abraham Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and others — are the DNA of every dungeon you have ever explored. Every time you’ve rolled dice to hit an armour class, every time you’ve memorised spells that vanish on casting, every time you’ve delved for treasure in a monster-guarded ruin, you’ve been living in the world these writers built.
Most D&D players have never read a word of them.
Why It Matters
D&D did not spring from nowhere. Gygax and Dave Arneson built the game from an obsessive love of the fantasy and science fiction literature of the preceding half-century. The rules encode assumptions about how magic works, what heroes want, what dungeons mean, and what the world feels like — and all of those assumptions come from specific books.
Appendix N is the key that decodes those assumptions.
The magic system. D&D’s iconic magic system — spellcasters memorise spells, cast them once, and must re-memorise them — is not an invention of Gygax’s game design. It is Jack Vance’s magic system, taken almost directly from his Dying Earth series (1950). Vance imagined wizards on a far-future earth as scholars who “commit” spells to memory the way you might memorise a poem, and who lose the pattern upon casting. In the Dying Earth, a wizard who has used his spells is as vulnerable as a scholar who has read his books to someone who just burned the library. Gygax loved this conceit. He built the entire magic system of D&D on it. Every time a D&D wizard casts Magic Missile and loses it, that’s Jack Vance.
The dungeon itself. The image of an underground labyrinth full of monsters, traps, and treasure is not medieval history — medieval people were not in the habit of building monster-filled dungeons under their castles. The dungeon as adventure space comes from fantasy literature. Specifically from Howard’s ruins, from Fritz Leiber’s underground cities, from Clark Ashton Smith’s tomb-haunted landscapes, from Dunsany’s fairy-tale towers. The dungeon is a literary invention that got codified into a game.
The thief class. Fritz Leiber’s Gray Mouser — the quick-fingered, lockpicking rogue of the Lankhmar stories — is the direct ancestor of the D&D thief class. Leiber even coined the term “sword and sorcery” to describe his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. The thief who relies on speed and cunning rather than strength and armour, who picks locks and sets traps and stabs from the shadows — that’s the Mouser.
Alignment. The famous D&D alignment system — Law vs. Chaos, Good vs. Evil — comes directly from Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga. Moorcock’s entire cosmology is built on the war between Law and Chaos, with humans caught between two sets of cosmic powers that don’t care about them. Gygax took this axis and made it a character sheet checkbox.
The moral complexity of the hero. The D&D adventurer who isn’t a knight in shining armour — who steals, who kills for gold, who operates in moral grey areas — that’s Howard’s Conan. Conan is a thief, a mercenary, a pirate. He does bad things for comprehensible reasons. He’s not evil; he’s pragmatic. D&D gave players permission to play like Conan. Most of them didn’t know who they were playing like.
The Authors You Need to Read
Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) The creator of Conan. Howard invented sword and sorcery — the genre of the lone, competent hero in a world of ancient sorcery and physical danger. His Conan stories, written for Weird Tales magazine in the early 1930s, established the template for the D&D fighter: physically formidable, worldly, motivated by gold and freedom rather than nobility. The real Conan is more interesting than any film version — smarter, more philosophical, capable of genuine loyalty. The Tower of the Elephant is the perfect starting point.
Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) The man who literally named the genre. In 1961, Leiber coined the term “sword and sorcery” to distinguish this type of fantasy from the high fantasy of Tolkien. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series — two adventurers in the corrupt city of Lankhmar — is the template for D&D’s urban adventure. The Mouser is the original rogue. Fafhrd is the original barbarian-turned-reluctant-hero. They bicker, scheme, get drunk, fall in love badly, and occasionally save each other’s lives. Swords and Deviltry is where to start.
Jack Vance (1916–2013) The D&D magic system is Vance’s magic system. That alone would make him essential. But the Dying Earth stories are also extraordinary in themselves — a far-future Earth where the sun is dying, civilisation has collapsed and risen and collapsed again, and a handful of clever people navigate a world where magic works but so does ingenuity. Vance’s prose is uniquely witty; his dialogue is unlike anyone else’s. His wizards are magnificent frauds. Start with The Dying Earth (1950).
Michael Moorcock (born 1939) The alignment system is Moorcock’s. His Elric of Melniboné — albino emperor of a dying civilisation, wielder of the soul-drinking sword Stormbringer — is one of the most influential characters in fantasy history. Elric invented the antihero in fantasy: a protagonist whose power is genuinely dangerous, whose cause is sympathetic but whose methods are monstrous. Every dark elf, every morally compromised magic-user, every character whose alignment is “chaotic neutral” owes a debt to Elric. Start with Elric of Melniboné.
Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) The strangest voice in the original Weird Tales triumvirate (Howard, Lovecraft, Smith). Smith wrote about dying worlds — Zothique, the last continent of a far-future Earth; Hyperborea, a prehistoric realm of sorcery and ice; Averoigne, a mediaeval France haunted by demons. His prose is extraordinarily ornate; his imagination is limitless. Where Howard writes about physical danger and Lovecraft writes about cosmic horror, Smith writes about the beauty of decay — a world where everything magnificent is also already dying. His influence on D&D’s more esoteric elements (lich kings, dying-earth settings, the necromantic tradition) is profound.
Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) The grandfather. Before Tolkien invented secondary world fantasy, Dunsany invented it. His independently-created mythology — The Gods of Pegāna (1905) — was the first of its kind in English. His short stories in The Book of Wonder established the ironic fairy tale. His novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) is one of the great unread fantasy masterpieces. Tolkien cited him. Lovecraft imitated him. Almost everyone who built the genre read him. Start with “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” — three pages, free online, perfect.
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) The creator of Tarzan and John Carter. Where the other Appendix N authors feed into D&D’s fantasy tradition, Burroughs feeds into the science fantasy tradition — the Barrier Peaks module, the planar adventurer, the science fiction crossover. John Carter’s Barsoom — a dying Mars with dying seas, ancient civilisations, and constant physical combat — is pulp adventure at its purest. The D&D fighter who fights as an art form, who judges situations by instinct and sword arm rather than planning, is partly Burroughs.
The Game Is the Reading List
Here is what Appendix N is really telling you: D&D was never just a game. It was a delivery mechanism for a reading tradition. Gygax built a machine that put players inside the experience of the books he loved.
Every dungeon is a Conan ruin. Every thief is the Gray Mouser. Every alignment is Moorcock’s cosmology. Every wizard memorising spells is a Vance scholar. Every dying-earth setting is Smith’s Zothique. Every secondary world with its own mythology is Dunsany’s Pegāna grown vast.
You’ve been in these stories your whole life. You just haven’t met the authors yet.
Where to Start
If you’ve played D&D and want to read the books that built it, start here:
- Howard — The Tower of the Elephant (free online)
- Leiber — Swords and Deviltry (the first Fafhrd and Mouser collection)
- Vance — The Dying Earth (short, cheap, essential)
- Moorcock — Elric of Melniboné
- Dunsany — “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” (free, three pages, start here)
- CAS — The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (Night Shade Books collection)
Six books. Six authors. The entire foundation of the game you love.
Gary Gygax’s original Appendix N list appears on page 224 of the 1979 AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. It has been reprinted and discussed in the OSR community — search “Appendix N” for extensive reader commentary.
