In the beginning was Tolkien…and wargaming and historical reenactment and other ingredients in the gallimaufry that made Dungeons & Dragons. D&D inspired other TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games), which in turn inspired yet more novels, movies, comics, and other media. (Of course, others have written at length about D&D’s cultural influence—you may want to take a look here and here for further reading).
Herewith, some works with RPG DNA: works that you may not know and may like, featuring the now familiar teams of skilled adventurers—don’t call them murder hobos—using their diverse skill set to solve problems. Usually by stabbing them.
J. Zachary Pike’s darkly comic Dark Profit Saga (2014’s Orconomics: A Satire, and 2018’s Son of a Liche) leans hard into its RPG roots. As far as the Lightkin of the Freedlands are concerned, Shadowkin are Forces of Evil (FOE) by default, with only a chosen few permitted conditional Noncombatant Paper Carrier status. FOEs can be killed on sight, their possessions distributed to better the general economy. This straightforward system has been so fantastically successful that 40% of the Freedlands’ economy comes from looting. The only possible thing that could go wrong would be if it turned out that the wealth of the Shadowkin races was finite and nearing its limits. That would cause an economic catastrophe, as highly leveraged assets became worthless.
An act of charity—saving a goblin from off-handed murder—earns disgraced adventurer Gorm Ingerson a chance at redemption, one he cannot turn down. All he needs to do is lead a ragtag group of adventures as they escort yet another would-be Chosen One on a hero’s quest, in order to establish if the fellow really is divinely favoured, or, like his predecessors, sadly deluded. The quest seems routine…but there’s a hidden goal of which Gorm and his companions have no inkling.
***
Of course, the standard by which RPG-themed satire is judged is Rich Burlew’s long-running Order of the Stick (2003 to present). What began as a gag-a-strip stick-figure webcomic mocking the quirks of 3rd and 3.5th edition D&D quickly grew into something more. Sane Man fighter Roy Greenhilt has assembled a ragtag gang of eccentric colleagues and set out to defeat the evil lich Xykon. Seventeen years later, the lich is still… uh, “alive” may be the wrong word…active.
What began as a simple plan to find and kill an undead being of unparalleled power and evil has spiralled into an epic tale featuring grand sieges, true love, tragic death, character growth, and increasingly alarming revelations about the likely fate of this world. It’s an impressive work. There are reports that a conclusion looms, so this would be a good time to catch up on the archive. Note that print collections are available.
***
Meg Syverud & Jessica “Yoko” Weaver’s on-going webcomic Daughter of the Lilies focuses on Thistle, a masked mage who would greatly prefer to focus on healing people. Licensed adventurer Orrig wants to recruit her, not so much for her healing abilities, but for her offensive potential. She would join half-orc Brent, Elf Lyra, and orc Orrig himself, and engage in lucrative derring-do. For reasons only gradually revealed in the comic (reasons which I will not spoil here), Thistle wants acceptance by friends and colleagues, but fears she will never find it. Previous relationships have foundered when new friends learn too much about her.
Adventuring is by no means her first choice of livelihood, but if that’s what it takes to have a place in society, Thistle will sign up. And then…
***
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2016 novel Spiderlight, Dark Lord Darvezian’s legions of darkness appear well on their way to inevitable victory. Darvezian is just the latest of a long sequence of would-be world conquerors, failures all. Guided by prophecies of unclear origin, adventurers have always managed to save the world from the Big Bads. The latest prophecy leads Penthos the wizard, Dion the cleric, Lief the logistical enhancement expert, Cyrene the archer, and Harathes the holy warrior to the lair of a great spider matriarch in quest of two items the group believes will be needed if they are to prevail over Darvezian: one of the spider’s fangs, and the services of one of her brood. Brood members never leave their community. Nevertheless, the matriarch acquiesces. Fang in hand, the group continues on its way, accompanied by Nth, a very unhappy spider-turned-human who doubts he will ever see his people again.
***
In Flo Kahn and T Campbell’s1 long-running Guilded Age webcomic, adventurers Byron Hackenslasher, Syr’Nj, Frigg Akerfeldt, Gravedust Deserthammer, Payet Best, and Bandit Keynes are hired to assist the rapidly expanding nation of Gastonia in its continued expansion. The adventurers are keenly aware that their bosses are not nice people; nevertheless, each has reasons for signing up.
Readers then learn that the team are just characters in an online RGP, Kingdoms of Arkerra, helmed by game designer H. R. Dedalus. The designer believes that Byron and company are merely characters in his game and that their actions are constrained by his software. How is it then that the characters, and the game, display emergent behavior that Dedalus did not expect at all? Is he in control…or not? Has the designer fundamentally misunderstood the nature of his creation?
***
No doubt you have your own favourites and have been growing increasingly concerned as I fail to mention them.2 Feel free to list them in comments below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is currently a finalist for the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]The art in this comic is by Erica Henderson (Chapters 1 through 7) and John Waltrip (Chapter 8 onward). Just to make sure that they get properly credited.
[2]I sold bags and bags and bags of Dragonlance books when I had a games shop and I didn’t read a one, if you’re wondering where they are.
I’ve always thought that a lot of Glen Cook’s fantasy works feel like homebrew campaign settings. The Garrett, PI series probably has the most obvious D&D bones, but the Black Company and the various books connected to the Dread Empire feel that way, too.
The ur-example, of course, is Andre Norton’s ‘Quag Keep’, inspired by playing a game wit St Gary himself.
The great-grandmammy of them all is QUAG KEEP by Andre Norton. Published in 1978, it was reportedly inspired by Andre Norton being introduced to an early version of D&D in 1976.
If I recall correctly, Moon’s Paks books were inspired by her overhearing RPGers paladining wrong.
2, 3: jinx!
My Dragon Precinct series is very much inspired by my RPG days — the two main characters are both RPG characters I played in my 20s.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The last book’s worth of pages of Order of the Stick started just a couple of months ago, and Burlew expects that it will take on the order of five years to finish the story (based on how the last couple of books have gone). Longer if things stretch out beyond his expectations, as the last couple have. (Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”) So it would be a distant looming.
What about the book, Brave Story, by Miyuki Miyabe and translated by Alexander O. Smith? It’s a children’s book (that’s over 800 pages long), and it won The Batchelder Award. The narrative follows the structure of a RPG.
http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/batchelderaward/batchelderpast
Orconomics is an excellent series. I recommend it all the time to people.
I’ve not seen him confirm it, (not really looked) but Raymond Feist wrote for RPGs at the start of his career, and Magician et al feel very much like a D&D campaign being invaded by the Empire of The Petal Throne.
According to a private conversation I had with Dave Arneson back in 2001, part of the inspiration for D&D was also a late-night monster movie marathon.
Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series is another one.
As I recall, there’s a moment in Feist’s Magician that really feels like everyone selecting their character class.
Drew Hayes NPCs series is quite good, follows a group of NPCs trying to complete the quest after the party dies from ignoring the DM.
What about the Malazan books? Erikson and Esselmont developed much of their worldbuilding through gaming.
What about Dragonlance: Chronicles?
As did the Expanse series, I believe.
There’s a lot of it out there. Feist’s Midkemia novels, starting with Magician, came out of a game that was a mashup of D&D and Empire of the Petal Throne (in a campaign that included other San Diego SF writers of the time). ISTR that Brin’s SF/Fantasy mashup The Practice Effect came out of the same RPG group.
Mary Gentle’s Grunts (and the Midnight Rose Villains collection) was another long running campaign, GM’d by her partner. Many of the funnier lines were apparently player remarks…
Being several hundred pages into Sanderson’s The Way of Kings – that is, less than halfway – I’ve developed the impression that the work has a significant connection to RPGs. Mind you, this impression is unsullied by any crass information gathering beyond the text itself. Not so much a translation of the author’s tabletop campaign, but possibly written with one eye cocked toward building a campaign world, whether tabletop or computer based.
Ok, I broke down and looked, albeit very quickly, and there’s no immediate indication that I’m correct.
There’s a specific subgenre of novels called LitRPG. Do a search on Amazon to find some. From what I’ve seen, they are self-pubs, not traditionally published.
The idea of a vomit-pile of RPG tropes as a novel makes me run screaming in the opposite direction. I’ve been cornered too many times at a con or a nerd friend group by someone who thinks their character and its adventures in D&D are the most fascinating thing ever. Nope.
What? No love for Wild Cards which George himself says came about when he realized he was going to have to figure out a way to make money from his super hero rpg or stop playing.
14: That was half [1] of my idea for a Dungeon World campaign: the valiant dragon-killing heroes the patron thought they were hiring were in fact the hirelings of said heroes, who all died trying to kill a dragon. The dragon choked to death from overeating.
The other half of the idea was that all the quests would be boring everyday tasks. The first one involved retrieving an overdue book from a wizard with term loan privileges [2].
1: OK, maybe a third. It mattered that the world they were in was put together by a team of gods, most of whom left the important stuff up to the one diligent member of the group. Well, except for the god who was supposed to spin the world up to a 24 hour day and kept insisting they had everything under control until the last minute, when they just tided locked the place and hoped nobody would comment. NO I AM NOT BITTER ABOUT GROUP PROJECTS IN SCHOOL WHY DO YOU ASK?
2: NO I AM NOT BITTER ABOUT THAT TIME A GRAD STUDENT SHOWED UP AT THE LIBRARY WITH A LITERAL CART LOAD OF HIS PROF’S TERM LOAN BOOKS TO RENEW, AN HOUR BEFORE THE DEADLINE IN THE DAYS WHEN SIGNING BOOKS OUT INVOLVED PAPER FORMS WHY DO YOU ASK?
Edge case- The Stellar Almanac, a travel guide to Hell (with a scored national anthem, with history. Systems of weights and measures! A cataloging system for the infernal archives! Histories of the flags of hell!), which came out in 1974, apparently spinning out of an epistolary game played by the author and a friend where they assumed the identities of infernal law firms arguing over the disposition of Beethoven’s soul.
I am given to understand that Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos books spring from an RPG campaign. Way back in 1987, Tor published Dzurlord in its Crossroads Adventure series of CYOA-with-stats-and-dice books, closing the circle.
Any “choose your own adventure” novel.
I’m glad to see that Grunts and Villains have already been checked. A couple of Diana Wynne Jones books owe quite a lot to RPGs, most notably The Tough Guide to Fantasy-Land and The Dark Lord of Derkholm and its sequel Year of the Griffin – basically an FRP-like world which is that way because it’s being run as a tourist operation for groups of enthusiastic murder hoboes visitors from a much more advanced world very like our own…
Wasn’t Record of Lodoss War based on the creator’s D&D campaign?
It goes both ways. RPGs themselves were largely inspired by sword and sorcery stories, and the later SF and fantasy (e.g. Jack Vance) that was also inspired by them.
Others have mentioned Quag Keep.
I supposed not technically an RPG but there’s also George Alec Effinger’s “The Zork Chronicles”
My favorites in this sub-genre include Rosenberg’s “Guardians of the Flame”; Tepper’s “True Game”; and the podcast cum novel series “Secret World Chronicles” by Lackey et. al.
DIE, the ongoing comic series by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans is perhaps a little too on the nose, being not so much inspired by RPGs as directly about them (and portal fantasies, and the fantasy genre in general, and a little bit about video games. And aging and loss and and and…) and with a bespoke RPG system created alongside it.
One point more for choose you own adventure!
I was going to chime in and say that, as far as quotes from author’s can be believed, Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion series was inspired by her seeing someone (more than one?) being atrocious at playing a paladin (probably your stereotypical murder hobo) and she thought “that’s not how a character like that would act.” There is a town in the second book that seems to be the village of Hommlet with the serial numbers filled off (well, it is well done, not quite that blatant). But James Davis Nicoll @@.-@ beat me to it.
Also, I believe Fiest’s Magician books spring from his collage D&D campaign, at least as a setting. Though someone else mentioned him above. But these works go back a bit (Fiest’s first Magician book goes back to 1982, and Moon’s first Paksenarrion book hit the shelves in 1988). Nowadays, I think it would be hard to find a fantasy book that wasn’t, at least indirectly, influenced by RPGs.
@33. There is a town in the second book that seems to be the village of Hommlet with the serial numbers filled off (well, it is well done, not quite that blatant).
The case seems to be pretty obvious, with detail-oriented gamers even noting that the ‘Druid’s’ hut was in the same location, and giant frogs in the moat formed part of the bandits’ diet.
Frank Chadwick’s The Forever Engine is based on some steampunk game or other.
There are a myriad of LitRPG novels that are all based on gaming, both online and tabletop. Some are from the player’s perspective, some are from the dungeon’s. There is a storefront on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/litrpg
For a moment,
I was thinking George Alec Effinger’s Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson stories would work, but probably not. However, now I need to reread them, so that’s okay.
Tepper’s True Game series is based on an RPG? I’d be very curious to see that game. Sort of superheroes in a fantasy world I guess?
I’m not certain whether they’re directly related, but I’m pretty sure that Ursula (Red Wombat) Vernon’s Monday role playing game sessions have contributed hugely to her Clockwork Boys duology and to the other works in the same Universe.
Anyone who’s watched her live-tweet a session can attest to how far off the wall the entire Party is.
I may be wrong, but what about Diane Duane’s Starrise at Corrivale trilogy?
@31 Never get trapped inside an RPG that’s about real-world people getting trapped inside an RPG, it gets very confusing.
Not a tabletop RPG, but the last part of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves is suspiciously similar to an MMORPG.
Call me on this if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that The Expanse started out as an RPG before Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck novelized it under the pen name James S. A. Corey
@42: Yes, it was originally conceived of as a tabletop strategy game, in a similar vein to Battlefleet Gothic, hence the franchise’s emphasis on the ship designs and their capabilities. On a related note, if you haven’t already, check out Spacedock’s “Force Recon” series; it’s an analysis of the various ships present in the show, and done as a collaborative project with the Expanse production team, it’s really good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQcoPDup5OI&list=PLqOEDroJnZHxf1X9LaMIk7jjUEDugPukx
Do all the stories referencing “a maze of twisty little paths that look all alike” count?
I’m glad that someone mentioned The Expanse — that was one that came to mind for me.
And, although I am generally wary of self-published books, I highly recommend the “Iconoclasts” books (2 of a trilogy out so far) by Mike Shel, who is a RPG writer/designer for Pathfinder, among other things. It is well-written and wears its RPG-roots very lightly — but the plot of the first book basically involves assembling a party to go into some ancient ruins, so there you go (plus, there is an entire guild of people whose job is to retrieve artifacts from said ruins).
Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic also seems to have started as mainly per-strip gags, but has developed into having long-running storylines, character development, interesting world-building, all among the fun.
The First Time Reader page gives a good introduction.
Goblin Quest (and the other Jig the Goblin books) by Jim C Hines are a nice turnaround on the ripped from the RPG genre. Nice fun read, too.
An odder example is Nelvana’s 2017 cartoon, Mysticons. It’s basically Magical Girls meets D&D, set in a magi-tech world. “Gygax” is name-dropped as an in-universe deity.
The party consists of a human Mage, a dwarf Knight, a human Thief Ranger, and an elf Acrobat Striker (I’m guessing “thief” didn’t pass Canada’s BS&P, but I don’t know why they can’t say “acrobat”).
A few people mentioned Ray Feist’s Magician books. I recently chatted with Ray about it, and he openly credited his worldbuilding to his DMing experience. Midkemia was published as a game supplement before it was ever in a novel–I own it.
Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is not based on an RPG. (He has written about its genesis) but surely it’s influenced by his being an RPG player.
It suddenly occurs to me Banks’ Consider Phlebus could be seen as a rather unsuccessful Traveller campaign (obs set in a non-canon universe).