Oh no, I don't mind it. I'm just not a long-time D&D vet and there were a lot of words and names being discussed that I'm not familiar with, so I thought that maybe some references to alignment or the history of how the system came to be was just going over my head.
So in terms of major literary inspirations for early D&D, the big one everybody thinks of is Tolkien, for good reason. A major influence who is less well known to the general public (at least for the moment, his works are in the process of being adapted, so it would certainly be interesting if he was received like The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones) is Michael Moorcock. Where Tolkien is very prose heavy, scholarly influenced epic high fantasy, Moorcock is 60s and 70s pulp psychedelic fantasy. As he was writing around the time when table top fantasy gaming was first developing, his works played a big part in how these games evolved.
Most of his books are part of the Eternal Champion saga, a multiverse where Law and Chaos are constantly at odds with each other, as opposed to good verses evil found in Tolkien and most other writers of the genre. The Forgotten Realms’s law and chaos dichotomy can be traced directly back to Moorcock, and the cursed sword Stormbringer, wielded by the most popular incarnation of the Eternal Champion, Elric of Melnibone, was actually an item listed in D&D rulebooks up until 2nd Edition. There were probably some other direct references to Moorcock that have escaped me.
And @KillerRabbit, without getting too off topic, that Theogamy quote is from the Titanomachy, and is describing the climactic battle between the Olympians and the Titans, a battle so fierce that it even disturbed chaos. It’s not a description of Greek chaos, which is only mentioned in passing. Chaos is Greek mythology was the absence of everything, complete nothingness, and is very different from the force that is the antithetical opposite of law as it is in Moorcock.
The Metamorphoses was written by Ovid 600 to 700 years later, and Roman conceptions of Chaos were different from the Greeks, and much more similar to Moorcock.
Alright, I think I’m done being the objectively biggest geek on the BG3 forums for a little while. I’m going to sit on this here pillar of skulls and drink some Martinelli’s Apple Juice like a boss.
