http://www.geocities.com/asfrlist/books/crystalsinger.jpg
D&D started with Gygax imposing his own very idiosyncratic vision on the fiction of Leiber, REH, et al.
I think it's fair for gamers to take a long, hard look at the printed fiction that profoundly shaped the gaming industry in its heyday.
I suspect that classic tabletop gaming sang its swan song sometime shortly before Lorraine drove Gary out into the outer darkness. There may be a rebirth of tabletop gaming, but whatever comes afterward will be entirely different.
I suspect that a hugely important trend in the fiction of the 1970s and 1980s was a massive upsurge of feminist ideas from both male and female writers.
I suspect that fantasy got a big dose of this because it was seen as more intuitive, more emotional, and more female than sci-fi.
One place to start is C. J. Cherryh's ultra-feminist witch, Ischade, who starred in the Thieves' World series that kicked off in 1978.
Ischade was an extremely powerful witch with free-form powers. She was also well-written, so she stood out in a sea of dreck.
Ischade was seductive and she pretended to be a whore. She had to keep getting new sex partners because her magical power was so great that it killed every mortal man she slept with.
By now it should be clear that Ischade is female wish-fulfillment embodied. But Ischade is a damn good power fantasy. She's a well-written female power fantasy stuck in the middle of a bunch of bad female-written fantasies and even worse male-written porn.
A male character roughly equal to Ischade in raw power was Tempus. Tempus was not very well-written, but he was surrounded by a constellation of characters with even worse writing, so as the series wears on, Tempus' contribution to the badness decreases. Tempus had a major relevance to feminist doctrine: he was intimately associated with raping women. (The series was not extremely consistent about whether or not he was impotent if he was not raping someone. He managed to have consensual sex with Ischade, and he seems to have been bisexual, so you can read quite a lot of different messages into the books, but my opinion is that he was just vaguely and badly written. This lasted until he got a steady girlfriend, and then he just became ridiculous.)
So was Thieves' World feminist, on balance? Much of it was porn aimed at teenage boys. But central characters like Ischade and Tempus undermined traditional heterosexual male roles and glorify feminist female tropes (such as Woman As Empowered, Promiscuous Seductress).
I enjoyed Cherryh's contributions to Thieves' World. She was/is enough of a writer to paralyze my objections to her message before I could think them, and thus I kept reading her stories.
By contrast, Anne McCaffrey's writings do not fascinate me. Even when the spunky gamin heroines get cute mini-dragon sidekicks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern