An (incomplete) Appendix N

September 8, 2025

Created as part of Prismatic Wasteland’s Appendicitis Blog Bandwagon.

Influence is a very hard thing for me to specifically quantify a lot of the time. I don’t usually think of an Appendix N - an explicit list of influences - going into a game. Sometimes I go into a game thinking I’m going to be influenced by one thing and then come out influenced by another thing by accident and have to piece it together after the fact. So a lot of my influences have to be kind of backed out after the fact by thinking about what I was thinking of to get to a certain point. Also most of them are other games because I’m an uncultured cretin, but also I’m trying to pull more directly game-influential stuff rather than stuff that generally gave me good vibes because otherwise we’d be here all day.

Non-Game Stuff #

• The Expanse: A sci-fi series that has a firm grasp upon the scope of the size of space is a rare thing. Two planets and a handful of stations and colonies and that’s all you need, really. (I know more become a thing later but it’s rarely in focus and even then only like…one or two at a time matter.) I can probably peg my preference for more “grounded” sci-fi (especially NULL_SPACE/Liminal Void) to its (extremely relative) “hard”-ness.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans: IBO hit at the exact right time when I was thinking about mech TTRPG stuff originally (more on that later). It’s incredibly brutal and cynical about its subject matter and increasingly bleak as time goes on, but not fully so. One thing it really nails is its increasingly unsubtle pokes at dehumanization of everyone involved in war and what it takes from everyone. The ending is good, actually.
• Various Fantasy-ish Genre Fiction: Catch-all because I read a lot of it. A lot of David/Leigh Eddings¹ and R.A Salvatore in particular, and a ton of awful Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and Star Wars stuff. If I had to pull something out of it all, it’s that you don’t need to try to make everything into a masterpiece for it to be enjoyable or meaningful. It’s fine. Just have fun and make something that someone’s going to have fun with.
• Capitalist Realism: Hard swerve. I’m a sucker for “it’s the future and things haven’t particularly gotten better” because, well, in many ways that’s largely been the trajectory of the past 25 years and a lot of the value of speculative fiction (interactive or otherwise) is exploring familiar things from a safe distance. In a lot of my future-y stuff in particular, I lean into the fact that we haven’t particularly improved socially; but instead it’s kind of more of the same, despite tech differences. One key part of that, though, is that its tagline of “Is There No Alternative?” is a challenge. I think that’s a throughline in a lot of my work, that idea of: “you are invested with some kind of agency and you are implicated in an unjust system, what do you do with that?” Even my more power-fantasy stuff has elements of that.

Video Games #

• Dark Souls (the first one): Look, I like a lot in the whole series and all but nothing does it quite like the original. (Demon’s Souls is great too but for different reasons and I’m only putting one of these fuckin’ games on here.) It tells you what’s going on, but only just. The items tell you a lot, but most of it’s not anything you actually need to know. It’s so easy to go through some random door or head down a basement and just go into a wildly different place by accident and knowing that makes every new area feel exciting. They hadn’t tuned the game such that they expect everyone to be hitting I-frames yet so everything still feels meaty and deliberate. The second half of the game runs out of steam for me but that’s fine. I’m gonna stop here because the amount of digital ink spilled on this game, much less this series, has already fully saturated the idea space.
• Armored Core 4/4A/6: As storytelling goes, the Armored Cores I’ve played (minus 5/Verdict Day, which I played but I just really don’t care for as much) do a lot with a little. A lot is told diegetically through dialogue (with some fantastic voice-only characterization in 6 particularly), through scenery, or via mission objectives or framing. Fast mechs are good and being powerful is good. It’s fine to just trash a bunch of useless enemies in your way, who fucking cares: that’s usually not the hard part, the hard part is doing it efficiently or whatever’s at the end. One thing I miss in 4A/6 that’s present in 4 is default blueprints/loadouts that include weaponry because those tell you a lot about a company/manufacturer and what they want in a mercenary: bring those back.
• XCOM (the original and 2010’s reboot): Do we love extremely explicit game loops? (Detect a UFO, shoot it down), go to the crash/landing site in force, get what you can from them, build your base and upgrade your soldiers and their gear. Intersperse with harder/“Terror” missions and pre-built “progress” missions. At least some of that should sound familiar reading AF or Celestial Bodies.
• Knights in the Nightmare: This game is like a bullet hell RTS where you summon the ghosts of soldiers and the game mostly attacks your cursor. Go look it up if you’ve never heard of it, it’s fucking wild. (Also the soundtrack is fantastic.) The big thing I pull from it is the way it does storytelling: it tells you very little, but switches between the current “what’s happening” and a flashback of how things got there, frequently involving characters whose spirits you’ll be recruiting. It’s the big thing I accidentally pulled from for ANOINTED: that concept of “not knowing something and gradually remembering things” is really convenient for a TTRPG format, or really any kind of game. A running theme that develops is “your character had power, screwed up badly, and it had consequences, can they make it right”. That hits in the sense that I tend to prefer to give player characters some kind of skin in the game rather than make them pure underdogs - you have some kind of privilege that someone else in the setting doesn’t have, so what do you do with it? - but this takes it and tacks a leading question onto the end. You had some kind of privilege and used it poorly, so where do you go from here? I love adding a little hint of pre-complicity to player characters.
• Front Mission (probably 3): My favorite kinds of mechs are probably “increasingly more of a person than the pilot”, “you are basically an unkillable fighter jet ace”, and “basically just a story about being dragged into some kind of proxy war between two powers” and any given Front Mission is usually the third one. I appreciate something that makes a point of explaining why mechs are relevant and putting them in context with other kinds of mechanized units. 3’s the best Front Mission, probably, so I suppose we’ll go with that. (That remake looks like shit though.)
• Xenoblade (X and 3): Xenoblade X has a very offline-MMO feeling in a lot of senses, and one of them is that much of it is an extremely coherent Mission Loop. A lot of the on-foot classes basically boil down to “combine two weapons/powersets” once you get far enough into all of them and that’s a really good way to do something that feels like a “job” system but isn’t actually. As for 3, I’m famously an Equipment Hater for fantasy games and Xenoblade 3 completely sidesteps it by making equipment nearly nonexistent. Instead, it puts the emphasis on jobs that you get by meeting and recruiting new people. 1’s good but not nearly as influential on me and I didn’t get far in 2.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Age of Decadence, Geneforge, Gothic: Lightning round. A lot of these have very good individual things to pull out but mostly I want to point out a lot of motifs that at least 3 of the 4 have in common that I use a lot: diegetically confined game spaces; structures and areas repurposed from older times that change in context as you learn more; a sense of inherent transgression to your presence; and (echoed before) an approach to morality of “nobody is forcing you to be a good person and you can basically do whatever you can get away with, so what manner of person are you if you can get away with it?”

Tabletop Games #

• Lunar Reckoning 69: Reactions in order to this are probably a. “haha, the funny number, nice” and b. “ok but what the fuck IS that”. Well, I don’t blame you on either. It’s a tiny mech game from the early 2010s, so like a decade too early for the itch boom. I remember talking to the dev quite a bit in early forums/etc days about early versions and trying them out. I list it partially because it’s an early 3d6 thing I played that really got my brain in that headspace: it had a neat thing going on where a “straight” was a crit (or success, if it would fail) but triples were a crit fail (or failure, if it’d be a success) and it cares deeply about initiative. It’s not the first thing to get mechs in my headspace, but I mention it in particular because I tried to make some kind of complicated initiative system riffing off of it and accidentally backed into the core mechanic I’d discover like 6 years later and re-use for Total//Effect. I also list it because it’s one of the first time I had that kind of insight into the TTRPG development process ahead of time. I don’t know if the author is still doing anything in the TTRPG space.
• 13th Age: A lot of more “trad” oriented indie designers nowadays harken back to 4E D&D as a starting point. That’s fair, I suppose, but that’s not the one that brought me to the dance: it was 13th Age, which regardless of all of its faults in practice hit a much more approachable way to do D&D Fantasy for me. I’d played 3E/PF prior but 13A is where it really clicked in a way where I felt like I had a grasp on how it properly worked, because the game properly worked in play as well as being fun to make characters in. I appreciate that the classes feel distinct in structure while still having enough common customization elements that they don’t feel like you have to relearn the game with every new character, Escalation provides a nice pacing mechanism, Backgrounds are just absurdly cleaner than skill lists. It’s so clean that the less-clean bits really stick out: “death to ability scores” was a big thing when it came out and immediately people tried to take it out, including me! It should really not be news if you’re familiar with both it and Total//Effect that 13A wildly influenced T//E, but if you’re familiar with one and not the other, well, there you go. And I guess if you’re not familiar with either, you’re a real one and I appreciate you reading this far.
• Fragged Empire: Another tactics game, but this one in particular caught my attention because it did really smart things with fragmenting actions into sub-actions. One thing it really taught me is that I really like it when games have fairly simple verbs that hit when used in combination: though not as composite actions like FE did, but individually, using more split out and much looser action economies.²
• Apocalypse World: Aside from the billion things that everyone has already said about it, I can’t say enough nice things about the tone of the game. It’s a really easy game to just read from cover to cover. Trying to emphasize an authorial voice is something I’ve really leaned into of late, and a lot of that is gaining the confidence to try to take that kind of stylistic swing. It’s also a great example of the thing I say a lot: good design shines through, no matter how small your budget is.
• LUMEN: I don’t think this one should be news given my biggest game is a LUMEN game. It bears digging into, though. It was recommended me in context of being a way lighter version to do something like Fragged Empire: I was introduced to the system tag-first, and read it in the context of playtesting my meticulously balanced 13th Age variant. A SRD that openly went “you know what, it IS good if powers Just Fucking Work” and “what if we just didn’t give a shit about balance” hit me at exactly the right time. Mostly taking existential failure off of the table makes me think differently about why we tell stories and what we get out of them, even for games where you CAN lose or die or both: when you can’t use the stakes of “will the party survive this”, you’re forced to think about what combat is³, or what an encounter means, or what stakes themselves you even want or need to set.

I’m sure I missed something. That’s the problem with the soup. Maybe I’ll follow this up or edit it if I remember any more. Hope you enjoyed.

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