‘Appendix N’: The Weird Literary Origins of D&D

You arrive at a dark cave, you hear rumblings inside, what do you do?

OK, I hear you, you are choosing to look inside. You roll one of your twenty-sided dice for investigation and get a 10, but you employ your talisman of fortune so it counts as 11 and you successfully investigate. You enter the cave and find people reading an anthology of fantasy stories to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons.

The book is called Appendix N,  a selection of stories that reflect the actual Appendix N from the 1970s, in which Gary Gygax listed the books and authors that had influenced him in his quest to codify D&D away from its roots in wargaming. Editor Peter Bebergal reproduces the page and a half of the original Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading, as an appendix to this book but explains his choices to interpret the spirit of the list and, satisfyingly for the reader, publish complete stories while avoiding printing excerpts of novel length works.

D&D has had a remarkable effect on culture and society as a whole, not just on visual pop culture from E.T. (1982) to Stranger Things (2016-present). Hugo-Award winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky introduces this revised and expanded collection by pointing out both personally how becoming a Dungeon Master helped him develop his ability to tell stories and how, culturally, it allowed generations to have agency and identity in fictional environments where they had, traditionally, been shackled to the lead (white, male) protagonist.

There is, though, an irony in reproducing nearly 400 pages of the old, fixed narrative to celebrate the way that their formulaic genre allowed role-playing games to supersede them. And yet, the quality and variety of the selection reminds us that reading is still the ultimate exercise in entering another’s world. And, conversely, the rules of D&D are, in their own way, more constrained than the rules of fiction. Bebergal notes that Jack Vance’s use of magic is like the way that D&D uses it, but magicians use it quite differently in other stories and, anyway, Vance’s oddly cute creation story Turjan of Miir is interesting for reasons distinct from the procedural deployment of magic. Spoiler alert: Turjan completes a quest to earn the right to learn the secret to creating life in a dying world, but he ends up creating a happy twin to the angry woman his teacher has created.

Depending on how you measure it, D&D began at different times throughout the ’70s (codified 1971, named 1974, Dungeon Master Manual 1979) so an earlier version of this collection appeared in 2021, anchored by an essay from authoritative publisher and editor Ann VanderMeer who, among many other qualifying characteristics was editor of the iconic horror magazine Weird Tales where, for example, H. P. Lovecraft first published his Cthulhu stories (though well before VanderMeer became editor!). That essay still appears in this edition, but the collection, obviously, still reflects the era in which Gygax was working.

As you might expect from a collection of tales written mostly by men, mostly from the 1930s and 1970s, there’s a significant element of sexism to the characters and their worlds. But Bebergal has—except for the comic story “Crom the Barbarian” (1950) — managed to steer mainly clear of the worst excesses of princess and warrior, rings and wands fiction. Indeed, in C. L. Moore’s 1934 Black God’s Kiss the author (Catherine Lucille Moore) knowingly fashions the story of Jirel and her city’s rapey conqueror Guillaume. To the shock of all the victorious male soldiers in the almost century-old narrative, Jirel and Moore subvert the warrior princess genre not only by making “Joiry’s tall commander” a woman (shades of Game of Throne’s Brienne of Tarth) but also by the manner of her revenge.

Thank goodness, too, that genre subversion comes not just from occasional feminism. Scattered throughout the self-important mythical adventures there are abrupt deadpan satires like The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles (1951) by Margaret St. Clair or How Sargoth Lay Siege to Zaremm (1972) by Lin Carter. In fact, opening with that latter seems like a signpost by Bebergal that he understands the inherent hazards of fantasy’s excess pomposity.

Indeed, Lovecraft’s The Doom That Came to Sarnath appears in this collection and exemplifies the portentous style of alt-King James that permeates a whole tranche of world-building speculative fiction. If I had a dollar for every inversion of word order by a grandiose SF author, I would be able to live off my book reviewing. Lovecraft here is describing Sarnath: “Of polished desert-quarried marble were its walls, in height 300 cubits and in breadth 75.”

With names like Moore, Lovecraft, Vance, Andre Norton, Michael Moorcock, Manly Wade Wellman, Poul Anderson among the 20 authors, it’s not particularly surprising that there are some excellent deep cuts. But one of the surprises of this collection is how modern some of the stories seem. Even among the genre fiction whose debt to translations of Bibles and Sagas is way too heavy, there are pieces like Fritz Leiber’s The Jewels in the Forest whose timelessness belies its original appearance in 1932.

A monster enters the cave and roars his annoyance that you have filled his living room with books, lights, and dice. You all flee. He turns and thunders to the Dungeon Master, “I know gameplay was codified in 1971 as Chainmail and the first D&D booklets came out in 1974, but Appendix N didn’t appear until the 1979 Dungeon Master’s Guide. You know this. If you must disturb my silence, at least wait until the even newer, even more expanded version in five years! Now, begone!”