Inspiration and Attribution - Stormwild Islands

So hbomberguy put out a video recently about plagiarism and giving credit. Don't worry - you aren't about to learn that I stole a bunch of stuff for Stormwild Islands. But that video did make me realize that I should be giving credit for some clear inspiration I have taken from elsewhere. It's only fair. So this post will be going through the works that inspired me when designing, writing, and sharing my TTRPG. I'll add this as a section when I make the next minor revision to the books, as well.

Dungeons and Dragons by Wizards of the Coast - Obviously. This is a massive body of work that was my original introduction to TTRPGs as a medium. Specifically, 4th edition was the first TTRPG I ever played. We were terrible at it, and we didn't stick with it for very long, but coming back to it with a critical eye has given me a new appreciation for it, and for the other games it has inspired. I have also played a lot of 5th edition, and there are ideas from both in Stormwild Islands. From 4e come a lot of the combat mechanics - turns based on a set number of actions plus movement, classes giving a bunch of new actions to use in combat, minions as a way to add templates and new features to NPCs to streamline encounter design, and so on. This is also where I think D&D finally hits a good mechanical balance between casting spells and swinging swords. From 5e comes much of the approach to narrative design - keep it loose, and let players do the driving. In terms of flavor, I like this edition's difference in feel between swords and sorcery, even if the lack of out-of-combat parity in 5e was a not-insignificant motivator for finally deciding to put my ideas to paper to "fix" it. The bounded accuracy approach to 5e is genuinely fantastic, and I use a similar set of assumptions to inform the numbers in Stormwild Islands.

Lancer, by Massif Press - Perhaps more directly than D&D 4e, this is where a lot of the ideas for core combat mechanics in Stormwild Islands come from. It's also another system with a great approach to mission design and out-of-combat play. This TTRPG also has a fantastic method for building and presenting NPCs and combat sitreps, and I modeled the mission presentation structure for the pre-made missions after the phenomenal No Room for a Wallflower adventure. On balance, this is my favorite TTRPG system. While I deliberately avoided reading anything about it while writing Stormwild Islands, I strongly suspect I will enjoy Icon, Massif Press's current project, just as much.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher and The Dresden Files RPG by Evil Hat Productions - I like the way magic works in this series, and I like the RPG's approach to narrative play. This isn't something I took much mechanical inspiration from, but the Fontlands definitely take some notes from Jim Butcher's depiction of the Nevernever.

The Discworld series, by Sir Terry Pratchett - Too much to list everything. These books are stellar, and they have shaped my views on high fantasy, gaslamp fantasy, urban fantasy, and everything in between ever since I first read The Colour of Magic. Specifically, I want to credit this series for influencing the golems in Stormwild Islands, hence the name. I know my golems bear some similarities to the Warforged of D&D, and there is definitely some influence from there as well, but on the whole I definitely think of them as more similar to Discworld's golems than Eberron's Warforged. Also, the fae in Discworld are another source of inspiration for the Fontlands, and the Piecemaker weapon is a send-up to Detritus the troll's signature armament. 

Continuum by Aetherco/Dreamcatcher - This is such a cool TTRPG that I had to mention it. It is more of an inspiration in terms of scale and ambition than mechanics; I'm nowhere near confident enough to make a TTRPG where time travel is the core mechanic, but I have immense respect for the team behind this for being that bold. I don't think Stormwild Islands would exist without this showing me that it's okay to have big ideas. I'm still disappointed that we never got the full Narcissist expansion we could have had.

Divinity: Original Sin II by Larian - The broad idea for the combat skill system comes from here. I love the idea of mixing and matching skills, picking up new abilities and even combination actions from them, then using these to fill a limited number of slots. I was at one point going to adapt this even further by having combat skills give their own permanent, passive boosts, but it ended up not being quite what I wanted. This is also where the AP-based turn economy comes from, down to the ability to store AP for later or spend another resource to get a bit extra in a hurry.

Those are the big ones. There are other references, like Glacier Chain being a spell in, of all things, the Maplestory MMORPG by Wizet. The idea of the Colossal Sword is pretty generic, but I have always specifically pictured it as the Crypt Blacksword, my absolute favorite Dark Souls weapon. I won't list all of these, partly to avoid cluttering this post too much, partly because I don't remember even close to all of them now, and partly because I think it's fun to leave them for people to discover and enjoy.

The last thing is the subject of giving credit to the people who helped me write this. There isn't that much to say on this; I did the writing myself. Literally every word in the Player's Guide and Gamemaster's Guide was typed out and formatted by me. Again, I took inspiration from loads of places, but not content. The art was all done by Lenny Ditkowsky. The ones left out are those who stood by me and supported the project, so I'm mentioning them here. I had a small team of playtesters who helped me make sure everything worked the way I thought it should, though when I asked them how they wanted to be credited, none of them got back to me. So, in the interest of privacy, I'm just going to give a generic thanks to the playtest team. I'm also going to thank my family and friends outside that group for humoring me as I rambled about my ideas for the eighteen months it took to write them all down. To them: Thank you.