Inspirations
The module's credits give special thanks to Clark Ashton Smith and Casiana Literary Enterprises, Inc., "for use of the Averoigne stories as inspirational material." Castle Amber (Château d'Amberville) draws from the Averoigne stories of Clark Ashton Smith. The main non-player characters of the module, the Amber family (d'Amberville in French, as an option), are not actually in any of Smith's stories, and were created by the designer to provide a link to Averoigne. A selected bibliography is included at the rear of the module.
In addition to the Averoigne references, there are individual encounters within the module that have allusions to stories written by others.
One of the encounters in the module is an homage to (or copy of) the climax of Edgar Allan Poe's short story Fall of the House of Usher, involving a brother who can hear his dead sister, named Madeline in both cases, crying out from the grave where she was buried alive. The overall module has "a decidedly Edgar Allan Poe feel to it."
Many of the creatures also had a "Lovecraftian" feel to them.
Read more about this topic: Castle Amber (module)
Famous quotes containing the word inspirations:
“We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, it ... will turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedom ... that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)