Blackmoor reading list

[finarvyn]

Rather than that, I'd like to know the impact of stuff he actually is sure to have known - like, probably "Thieves World", given the AiF angle, or stuff he directly references to, like the Beagle.

I'm not really familiar with Thieves World at all, so I can't comment much. Seems likely though.

As with Horseclans, one must check dates. Thieves World was first published in 1979, which means it can't have had any impact on the 1971 campaign.

Indeed, my copy of Adventures in Fantasy is listed as 1978, which suggests that unless Dave perfected time travel Thieves World couldn't have had an impact on AiF, either.

The problem we encounter for most of this is that from 2011 we look back and say "dang, those books are old -- they go back to the 1970's" and we forget that Blackmoor was created somewhere around 1971. This means that we have to dig back into the 1960's and before for most of our inspiration. While I'm sure there were lots of old fantasy stories going around, the most popular had to include:

• Robert E. Howard's Conan (although probably the DeCamp/Carter edits and not pure REH)
  
• Leiber's Lankhmar
  
• Moorcock's Elric
  
• Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"
  
• Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions" along with "The Broken Sword"
  
• Norman's Counter-Earth (Gor) Books
  
• Lovecraft (one of the few really popular horror authors over the ages) and other classics of horror, perhaps Stoker's Dracula and Shelby's Frankenstein
  
• Mythology (lots of Greek and Norse)