What are some works that inspire you?

currently getting absorbed in pandemonium wizard village, for inspiration on monster folk

Dark Horse's Conan the Barbarian comics are a must-read

Jim Henson's Storyteller series is pretty great, both the old show and the comic miniseries they do now. Loads of inspiration to work from, and a tone that I like to strive for instead of just doing whatever comes to mind.

with the abyss being basicly designed as a super-dungeon, there are alot of ideas to use

it's a good source for coming up with weird wildlife

I take a lot of inspiration from The Culture to flesh out my sci-fi settings. Not so much the culture of The Culture (what a shitty sentence) but moreso some of the weirder ideas. One of my favourites was in "Matter," where Banks has a "shellworld" basically a huge planet made of onion layers of useable space. Its a superstructure I hadn't even considered the possibility of before, yet he looked at it from hundreds of little details. Like soil erosion being solved by weather manipulation, making dirt storms or the need for several moving "suns" within each structure's layer to have a day night cycle. He even has a medieval society living in one of the layers, with no idea that there is an "outside."

Dune. It has completely changed how I DM.

Usually some early forms of a madium contain great inspiration in condesend form.
I'm not saying that "older is better" but usually it's more simple.

Actual real world legend are a pretty good sources and most of them are hacks anyway.

I think simple but deep is a good desing philosophy because of that, for my Traveller campaing i get a lot of inspiration from the old captain harlock show, firefly and cowboy bebop.

Now i also want to add to myself.
There is a fine but important difference between, what i call, stealing ideas and copying ideas.

Copying an idea is pretty much creating a thinly veiled carbon copy of the original material. Usually the GM thinks that thise ideas are awsome and should be awesome when he uses them. Most of the times it leads to players seeign right through the material or the GM failing to see the whole system of used narrative elements

Now stealing ist taking something and thinking, "What can i do with it and what do i need to change to make it fit better ?" This actually requires some work on the side of the narrator but usually the single elements fit more well together and it's still less work than trying to come up with new thing.

Essential reading:

Nonfiction

The Next 100 Years by George Friedman
The Perfect Kill by Robert Baer
Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile
Fear And Loathing In Los Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond


Fiction

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Neuromancer by William Gibson