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My Appendix N (Appendix S?)

I am very late for the trend, but also I have been working on this blog post for at least a year now, so I might as well finish anyway.

This is hard for me to do, because my inspirations are kind of all over the place. Insofar as they come from books, they're mostly from books I read when younger that I no longer remember. I used to read a lot but rarely remember what I read.

Overall sources of inspiration

Places I have lived (Northern California and British Columbia, mainly) and visited
All the time I have spent on Wikipedia, and reading random nonfiction books. Almost anything I write, or even just home games, involve going down a rabbit hole
As a kid I was really into mythology, fairy tales and folklore. I started with the typical Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, then expanded to more of Europe, then beyond.
I didn't read much "epic fantasy" and mostly it didn't make a big impression on me. I do remember reading a lot of Redwall, Sabriel, books inspired by King Arthur and Celtic mythology, regular kids that found magic and went on adventures, etc. I don't read a ton of fantasy these days, maybe I should get back into it.
I don't watch a ton of movies or TV shows and mostly they don't affect what I write.
I have a big interest in pre-industrial crafts (especially fibre crafts but anything that I can get my hands on that I can make at home). Out of this I think has come an appreciation for the lives of regular people from the past. In terms of books, I'd recommend Women's Work: The First 20,000 years.
I have a somewhat non-typical cultural background for this hobby (not European, though most of what I've read is from a European background) and religious background (not Christian) and while I generally avoid talking about it, it probably does influence my work.

A Gathering storm (Cairn edition)

I've written a few versions of this for different systems, starting in 2020, but I'll go with the most recent one.

In 2020 I was missing BC, a rainy place with immense forests, as I lived in a drought-stricken place and didn't know when I'd be able to even visit anywhere else. Later on, we had some catastrophic flooding here as well, as I was rewriting it.
There's a drawing of a precarious staircase that is based on a real staircase in ruins in this city.
Other drawings were of plants in the local conservatory of flowers, which don't match the temperate climate at all but was the lushest place I could find for inspiration. Few trees naturally grow where I now live.
The berserkers are from a meme on tumblr about wanting to become moss, leaving behind the worries of everyday life, and what better reason to join some sort of nature cult.
The library that preserves knowledge is inspired by Anathem.
I didn't realize it was inspired by climate change until my playtesters pointed it out.
The tree which is a forest which is a god is probably kind of inspired by My Neighbour Totoro, much as it annoys me when people say their games are Ghibli-like when they really aren't, as well as the forest above the temple where my grandmother's side of the family would go, which made a real impression on me as something ancient and immense when I visited as a kid, something that has brought a sense of awe for a thousand years or more

Procedures to Discover the Path Ahead

This was written to try and solve a problem that I ran into in a different, never published zine, and it sort of got out of hand.
It was mostly written on a trip I took exploring Central California mostly via public transit, which made it a lot more of an adventure. I was also doing a bunch of hiking while I was there as well. I got there by train. So I really saw a lot of the changing landscape.
The tables of food were inspired by a mix of food that I like and this big map of all the staple crops of the world I found on wikipedia.
Most of the tables came from wikipedia in fact. I was trying to make it as universal and untethered from a specific time or place as possible.
The NPCs were very much inspired by the art I used. I was reading Wanderhome around this time as well and the approach there to defininig character playbooks made an impression.
I'm not totally sure all the touchstones for cities, but there are elements of one city in A Magician's Nephew there, along with thinking about cities as they must have appeared in the very first days of cities, in ancient Mesopotamia, as sites of power that distort the world around them. There was one moment standing in a museum in New York that made a big impression on me.

A game I an working on about taking the train

Taking the train, specifically Amtrak from Emeryville to Denver
- There's also part of a different train I took in Europe once - I needed to splice trains together to turn a train into an interesting dungeon
Going down rabbit holes googling things about the 1920s
- The Automat is a real thing which I found super weird and reminds me of some of the discourse around like Waymo
San Francisco's earlier history - I have been going to some local museums lately
Modern conflicts over technology and who gets to benefit
My many foamer friends (affectionate)
Labor history
Sometimes people on the Internet sound a bit too excited about one day being justified in shooting someone so I put such a person in the game.
Probably Gods' Man to some degree, which I was cutting up for parts for an unrelated project recently

Murky Bog

The name is a joke, I started with that
There's this cool bog near Tofino I saw as a kid that totally changed my view on bogs
Bog bodies and mummified mammoths
The constraints of my drawing abilities at the time

Other

My part of the Exquisite Corpse adventure was very much inspired by the graphic novel Stages of Rot
Some people think that Overdue is about my experience working for a library, which is very flattering, because I've never worked for a library. It's about grad school. The dragon is about academic publishing.
I have trouble figuring out where What Remains on Copper Island comes from. I am sure there are all sorts of pieces of books I read in the past in it but I just do not remember. It didn't consciously come from anywhere.
Same for A Stolen Sword in a Dark Forest.

The last two are definitely more on the "Grounded fantasy" side which probably comes more from an interest in history and how regular people lived than fiction writing.