As requested, what books, comics, videogames, films or plays have had the biggest influence on your gaming? Specifically what inspires your fantasy?

Jesus, that's a difficult question. It changes yearly really.

I'll give it some thought and try to post something later.

The Hobbit

The Prydain (sp?) Chronicles (The Black Cauldron and so on).

The covers to the LOTR novels. I feel asleep reading the books, but the covers were neat. Actually, the covers to a lot of the novels back then.

The Sinbad movies. That and Monty Python's Holy Grail really helped define D&D for me.

The Greek and Norse mythology books by the D'Aulaires (sp?)

This does require some thinking yeah...
Also this post will have more footnotes than anything I've written since I finished University.

BOOKS
Brooks: Shannara*
Tanith Lee: Birthgrave & Night's Master series**
Howard: stuff***
Moorcock: stuff****
Norton: post-apoc stuff*****
Tolkien: stuff
Vance: Dying Earth
Wagner: Kane******

COMICS
Flash Gordon*******
Groo*********
Jack Kirby*********

MUSIC
Bal-Sagoth**********

GAMES
Rogue & Roguelikes
Zelda series

*=the Shannara setting really is quite oldschool friendly (civilization is scattered except in the south; post-apoc and includes supertech cyborg beasties; lots of monsters and such about actually too). While it started as pure pastiche it really improved. My faves would be Wishsong and the second series (particularily the book with the Stone King, that one's good. And Elf Queen for its ridiculously monstrously dangerous island! That's what a high-level hexcrawl should look like!)
**=the Birthgrave setting is again very oldschool friendly. Love the city states and so on. While the average PC shouldn't be quite as clueless, well, peasant PCs would probably be...and I like exploration, and surprises! Night's Master for mood, cosmology and great demonlord personalities...and Underworld descriptions!
***=more for worldbuilding, history, cosmology and mood than actual stories (allthough I love said stories). Mysterious ruins, evil elder races, scary monsters, evil wizards, a sense of age, a sense of doom and elegy...
****=love his naming conventions and the breakneck pace of his early work! And...cosmology, again.
******=city states, evil gods, demons, science-fantasy alien monsters, once again a sense of history and age and elegy, a very strongly shades of gray setting decades before it was cool

*******=(30s-40s sunday strip Gordon) Mongo is the perfect sandbox hexcrawl setting. Hell the story reads like one too! Weird humanoids and monsters and women sexually harassing the protagonist (I'd stay away from the third bit ). Insert magic and you have the perfect oldschool D&D setting.
********=love the look of 80s-early 90s Groo. And the setting. And the jokes.
*********=space gods, man.
**********=space gods, man.

...er. This became really rambling. Will continue on later...

Depends on the genre, but for fantasy I'd have to go with a mixture of books and movies, in no particular order:

• Legend
• The Spiderwick Chronicles
• The Dark Crystal
• The Neverending Story
• The Voyages of the Princess Ark
• The Name of the Rose
• The Ninth Gate
• The Dragonbone Chair trilogy
• Most of Robin Hobb's work
• The Lies of Locke Lamora
• The Golden Child
• Game of Thrones
• The Name of the Wind (mega fan)

and just generally clever intricate tales with a childlike sprinkling of magic.

The cyberpunk Deep Blue post flood game (yes Panzerkraken I'm working on the art daily )

• Supernatural
• Star wars
• Fringe
• x-files
• Bladerunner
• The Fifth Element
• Split second
• Total Recall
• Predator 2
• The Alien movies
• Bourne conspiracy
• Mission Impossible
• American Gothic
• Deep Rising
• Blue Submarine No 6
• Ghost in the shell
• Black Lagoon (especially this, if anyone is aware of anything similar let me know!)
  

Also I've unofficially adopted Xtortion Audio's Untouchable as my "write shit for the game" tune. And the GitS song Stamina Rose because the ping around 0:40, the sound of fear in the deeps.

AUTHORS
Lloyd Alexander (Prydain Chronicles); Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn); John Bellairs; Algernon Blackwood; Robert Chambers; John Christopher (The Tripods); Susanna Clarke (Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell), John Crowley (Little, Big); Phillip K. Dick; Lord Dunsany; Edgar Eager; E.R. Eddison (The Worm Oroborus); Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere, Stardust); Frank Herbert (Dune series); Robert Holdstock (Mythago Wood, Lavondyss); Fritz Leiber; Garth Nix; Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast); Terry Pratchett; J.R.R. Tolkien (Smith of Wotton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham); Evangeline Walton (Mabinogion series); Manly Wade Wellman; Gene Wolfe

And a crapload of Fairy Tales

FILMS
The Beastmaster, Captain chronos-Vampire Hunter,Clash of the Titans, The Court Jester, Darby O'Gill and The Little People, The Dark Crystal, Dragonslayer, Excalibur, Hawke The Slayer, The Hidden Fortress, Jabberwocky, Krull, Labyrinth, Ladyhawke, Legend, The Last Unicorn, Lord of the Rings (Bakshi); Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail, The Neverending Story, Secret of NIMH, Sword of the Valiant, Time Bandits

(also the Lou Ferrigno Hercules films I cant recall the names of which were probably awful but at that age to me they were just like Heavy Metal album covers brought to life)

TV
Brother Cadfael Mysteries, Covington Cross, Darkstar, Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, Robin of Sherwood, Jim Henson's The Storyteller, Willo The Wisp

VIDEOGAMES
Altered Beasts, Castlevania, Dragon's Lair, King's Quest, Legend of Zelda, Zork

Let's see for me(Note: Strictly Fantasy listed here)


Videogames:


-Ys: Books 1 and 2(Particularly for 'Heroic' style games)
-Castlevania series
-Dragon's Dogma/Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
-Legend of Zelda/Link to the Past(See Ys)
-Final Fantasy 1
-Rygar/Rygar: The Legendary Adventure
-7th Saga
-Gauntlet: Dark Legacy
-Faxanadu
-Breath of Fire
-Dragon Quest
-Cadash
-Beyond Oasis
-Exile(For some darker religion-based worlds)


Manga:

-Berserk(for those much darker games)


Music:

Gamma Ray
Blind Guardian
Rhapsody
Amon Amarth
Finntroll
Sabaton


Movies:

Labyrinth
Princess Bride
Willow
Conan
Legend

(My movies are mostly usual fare. My books are essentially mostly listed under Appendix N as it is.)

Nice to see multiple mentions of the Legend of Zelda games here. They're what got me to look into tabletop RPGs. Pefect combination of mystery, exploration, acquisition, action and not too much story.

Started with the Fighting Fantasy game books (both solo and group play versions) and they still influence me today, especially through their art.

I haven't read that much fantasy or scifi since my Terry Pratchett binge years ago - I prefer nonfiction, spy stuff, play scripts, and quirky modern farces, but I try to find ways to recycle what I learn from those in tabletop games.

My chief influences are Magic: The Gathering and Square Enix video games (all Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, etc.)

Lately the anime Soul Eater has been providing me a lot of material.

I couldn't emphasise enough the influence of those solo gamebooks on creating my idea of fantasy; Fighting Fantasy perhaps the most, but I found the Lone Wolf books classier. I've always wanted to run a group of PCs through Shadow on the Sand, one I played through again and again until it fell apart! In fact, a whole Lone Wolf campaign would be awesome ... Whatever happened to the plans for a RPG? I thought there were rumblings a few years ago ....

Otherwise, I grew up on similar films to previous posters, particularly influenced at a very young age by The Black Cauldron animated feature, and The Never-Ending Story, and later Willow, The Princess Bride, and Indiana Jones.

As for books, I haven't read as much of the original N as I would have liked, though I've been enjoying properly discovering Leiber, Howard, and Moorcock as an adult.

However, just recently I reread the Earthsea Trilogy, which I've been reading and rereading since I was eight, and I was amazed at how well it stands up. The writing is properly beautiful, and economically evocative, unlike so much fantasy. And I think it's perhaps the treatment of magic, and particularly a magical apprenticeship, that has most shaped my ideas of what that should be like.

Thinking over the stuff I've specifically used for my recent Dwarf Fortress campaign:
-The Boatmurdered Let's Play.
-D&D With Pornstars, Monsters & Manuals, Daddy Grognard and Dungeon Dozen blogs and the general make it weird but play it with a straight face OSR aesthetic you see on a bunch of blogs.
-The deeply fucked up Green Antarctica alternate history timeline, especially for the monkeys.
-The Saga of Erik the Viking book.
-Random One Page Dungeon modules inserted as needed.
-The Croods for the weird animals.
-Recycled NPCs I liked from old campaigns.
-Warhammer 40K for a bit of goblin attitude, but the dwarves managed to ally with them anyway...
-Elves as asshole rules lawyers from fairy tales rather than the more modern asshole hippies. Gave them a Herne the Hunter vibe.
-The Black Company for general attitude about fantasy, but no specific content I can think of.

Comics: Doom Patrol, The Invisibles, The Filth, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Luther Arkwright
Books: Christopher Priest (The Affirmation, The Glamour, early SF), Michael Marshal Smith (Only Forward etc), early Neil Stephenson (Snowcrash, Diamond Age),  Moorcock (esp. Jerry Cornelius), John Harrison's Viriconium, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the obligatory nods to Zelazny and Vance
Films: Dark City, everything by David Lynch, everything by David Cronenberg (esp. Naked Lunch), Donnie Darko, Blade Runner, Delicatessen, Until The End of the World (Wim Wenders)
Games: Thief Dark Project + sequels, Quake (with NIN soundtrack), Zelda, Killer 7 and No More Heroes (Suda 51)

Speaking of solo game books-yeah, damn. Getting my memory jogged like that brought me back to the old Grailquest books(Realm of Chaos, The Castle of Darkness, etc.) I used to play those all the time back in my 7-8 year old years.

Ha! Yes! Grailquest was, I think, possibly my very first solo-play gamebook. I seem to remember in the one I had that there was a mistake in the "go to page XX" that made finishing it impossible. Given to me by my cool aunt's boyfriend of the time. Also remember having a lightning bolt on each fingertip and a fireball on each palm... was that the one?

You're kidding, right?

-clash

David Gemmell's books would be in there.