I don't talk much about my love (respect? appreciation?) for Lodoss--something I never really thought about until I read Dia's article last year. And then it clicked. I rarely talk about Lodoss like I rarely talk about Mystic Quest. For me, it was Lodoss before D&D, Tolkien, Le Guin, all of it. Mystic Quest before Final Fantasy, Shadowrun, Baldur's Gate, and so on. Not just temporally. I mean Lodoss and MQ led me to those worlds. Of course they're wildly different things, both in themselves and in relation to their context. And I wouldn't call MQ wildly influential in the way Lodoss was.
But they're riffs, adaptations, dilutions (whatever we want to call them) that, amid the genericness, have so much goddamn heart.
Anyway, read the piece above.
