Yesterday I stumbled onto an excellent blog, Raven Crowking’s Nest, which is also home to a project to read and write about the books in Appendix N. The author, Daniel Bishop, is an old-school gamer with a lot of insight into the hobby, and his posts on Appendix N books are great. He kicked off
Raven Crowking’s posts on reading Appendix N Read More »
There’s a long gap between my first Appendix N book, The Hobbit (paid link) — which was also my first Reading Appendix N book post, as I’m going in the order I read them — and my next one. One of my best friends in high school, Stephan, introduced me to H.P. Lovecraft by way
Reading Appendix N: The Dunwich Horror and Others, by H.P. Lovecraft Read More »
I’ve been curious whether Gary ever added anything to Appendix N post-1979, be it books he forgot to include or post-1979 works he would have included if he’d written the DMG later on. So I did some digging and found this post Gary Gygax wrote on EN World in 2007, a bit more than a
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My copy of Creep, Shadow, Creep (paid link) — which I believe was originally titled Creep, Shadow! — arrived today, and it’s by far the oldest physical book in my expanding Appendix N library. It promptly fell out of its cover, but should still be quite readable. There’s no date to be found inside it,
Creep, Shadow, Creep and Burn, Witch, Burn Read More »
I posted a thread over on RPGGeek about this project, and Steven Robert shared a link with me: Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading: Jack Vance. This is the latest in a series of thoughtful and informative essays about Appendix N authors and works by Eric Dodd, and it includes links to previous entries in
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Hunting down copies of old books for this project has been a lot of fun so far, but I needed a tool to make actual hunting easier — and if you’re looking for Appendix N books to read, you probably do, too. I’ve never seen Appendix N broken out book-by-book, so I decided
The 100-Book Appendix N Reading List Read More »
Part of my inspiration for this project came from my copy of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. The DCC RPG is based on Appendix N, and itself has an Appendix N. In that appendix is this picture of all of the Appendix N titles the author, Joseph Goodman, read before and during the time he
The DCC RPG and a reading list Read More »
My first foray into Appendix N was in 1984 or ’85, in second grade — I was either seven or eight — when I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (paid link). Of course, I didn’t know what Appendix N was at the time, or even what gaming was; I didn’t start gaming until 1987. But it’s
Reading Appendix N: The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien Read More »
I dropped by the only large used bookstore I know of in Salt Lake City during my lunch break, Weller Book Works, and while I didn’t buy any new Appendix N books I did learn something: If I stick my goal to read every work by all of the authors in Appendix N, or even
The size of the bite Read More »
July 2026 update: I’m still plugging away, and having a great time with Appendix N. I’ve tweaked my approach and list a bit; it’s now 90 listed titles plus another 34 read-what-you-feel-like books. I’m 55 books in now. October 2024 update: After burning myself out taking this project too seriously back in 2013, I
Reading Appendix N: The project, the appendix, and the goal Read More »
