GMs of Tildes, what books, movies, or other media have changed how you portray the world?

Many of Appendix N can change the way you perceive your world. Fritz Leiber's Fahfrd and The Gray Mouser books had changed my view of thieves and criminal operations in cities.

Brent Weeks has the Lightbringer series starting with The Black Prism Which has a truly unique system of magic and also made me question the active role of an emperor or ruler having them do more than be simple politicians.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss gave me a new look at a university for Magic.

For a bonus there is an episode of the television show Stargate SG-1 in which two of the characters get trapped in a time loop and eventually realize they have no consequences while looped. IIRC the episode is called Window of Opportunity. Anything with time manipulation can make for fun worlds.

I know it's not much, but this is what popped in my head. Pretty much anything I've ever read or seen one way or another helps build my world for my players.

Disco Elysium, hands down. I love the idea that when you make any "sensory" check, that it's the voice in the back of your head talking to the player. I think it opens up so many narrative opportunities, especially for low rolls that you'd have preferred to be higher.

As someone with pretty bad dyslexia books usually aren't my preferred type of media, but some, like the books by Markus Heitz and Bernhard Hennen or the Inheritance series by Christopher Paolini, were very important to the development of how I see the fantasy genre as a whole, as I read them in high school.

More recently the Warhammer books from the Black Library (which I like to read with a combination of both the physical book and the audiobook) have had a pretty large impact on my world, specifically The Infinite and The Divine changed how I portray some ancient or immortal characters.

Aside from books the "Irish Folklore Trilogy" movies by Tomm Moore (The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers) are some of my favourite movies of all time to begin with, but they've also very specifically helped me portray children that experience wild and wacky things like they might in a fantasy setting, and some of the plotlines or pieces of Irish Folklore that they use I pretty much just copy-pasted into parts of the stories I tell.

Lastly some games, like The Banner Saga and the Dragon Age series have influenced some npcs or (in the case of DA) magic and attitudes towards it in my worlds.

Those are some of the main and/or recent ones that popped into my head.

It’s funny, ever since becoming a gm my mind has changed in a way. Whenever I see something in media that I particularly think is cool / fascinating, I immediately think of ways on how that could be implemented into a story I could tell, likely with its own spin. Similarly, I have a media influence on my dragons, but instead by Skyrim as well as Smaug in the Hobbit movies, I totally endear the idea of a dragon talking up itself in a deep terrifying manor all throughout an encounter.

And while late to the game, I had just recently watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, and I can’t help but visualize all sorts of ways to make descriptions all the more interesting with some mimicry of the show. Things like how Toph “sees”things and how the elements are bent can be great descriptions for Magic.