Game, Something Else, Original Inspiration

The post that follows involves an observation I made to and about myself a few weeks back and is all that remains of a broader and deeper essay that sort of lost focus and came unraveled.  Maybe I'll revisit it sometime but for now I'm simply hoping for an unscientific survey of my readers.  I have enough readers now that I'm also hoping that my tossing a question out to the crowd won't be met with embarrassing cricket noises.  Please don't let me down, folks.  

Unlike perhaps some who got into gaming after having already been exposed to some of the inspirational material of D&D (or whatever game), I was almost always a gamer first then a consumer of something else before ever tracing anything back to an appendix N item.  Let me demonstrate:

I played D&D first, then discovered Led Zeppelin and THEN first read Tolkien


or

I played D&D first, then listened to Metallica and THEN finally read H.P. Lovecraft

or

I played D&D first, then read Savage Sword of Conan and THEN found out there was an R.E. Howard

or

I played Cyberpunk first, then saw Bladerunner and THEN read Philip K. Dick.

There are more, but you get the point.  In almost every case my interest in gaming predated interest or exposure to some inspirational source of gaming and this generally only came after exposure to yet another derivative medium.  For me, so the failed essay went, gaming was my gateway drug into the broader world of science fiction and fantasy literature and now I wonder how unique I am in having things in that order.

A notable caveat is that once I set out to actually read and discover things on appendix N years later, this rigid pattern was broken.  But as things were naturally occurring in my younger days, only triangulating my gaming interest to something else would have led me to excitedly picking up a battered Lancer/ Ace edition of Conan found at my grandparents' house.  I mean, of course,  for reasons other than the fleshy, full-bodied and nubile magic of the Frazetta cover. 

Does this pattern hold true for any of you?  You needn't limit yourself to D&D.  Consider more broadly: game, something else, original inspiration.   Were you a gamer first?

National Geographic Photo Galleries

I generally don't do much in the way of props at the table, but on occasion I do like to have an image handy when describing a landscape or feature in the game.  The picture and a thousand words and all of that.  While a Google image search is a grand thing, there's often some chaff to sort through.  Therefore, one really can't go wrong by having National Geographic's photo galleries bookmarked for reference or inspiration.

I have long been an off and on reader of the magazine and I'd say over the years one out of every four issues at least provides some inspiration for the game in some way.  The web site also has a lot to offer.  If you do a site search on "caves, photos" you'll get 100 pages of hits.  But don't stop there.  Look through the landscapes gallery and I dare you not to be inspired in some way.  Or, browse adventure & exploration.