Game designer. Writer. Original Fallout dev. Classic World of Darkness developer. Current Star Trek Online developer. He/Him. Account represents personal views.
... and the boss at White Wolf, @stevewieck, realized that there was an opportunity. WotC had shown their hand with their book release schedule and there was a short window during which D&D 3e would be out, but the Monster Manual wouldn't have arrived yet.
Early D&D drew many inspirations from swords & sorcery and low fantasy. While many people cite Tolkien's 𝘓𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 as a major influence, it's clear that D&D owes a lot to other fantasy stories cited in the 1e AD&D DMG's famous Appendix N.
D&D and even Shadowrun did the same: There was a story, it advanced through the books, the world changed and characters grew, died, or discovered new additions to the game.
When Sauron makes the One Ring, he puts so much of himself into the material that he becomes a creature like the other worldly beings of Middle-Earth—one that can be killed.
Often I'll pick a character at random and then throw some kind of mortal complication at them: You get summoned for jury duty. A group of urbex teens stumble into your haven and post a TikTok inside of it. Your credit card number is stolen and someone runs up charges.
Give 'em a Survival roll to catch that they're off course when they get lost, give the table a roll for "roll twice and combine" so they can have a sudden shift of inclement weather + an encounter at the same time, et voila...
Ok, so this book is an adventure anthology, sorta like 𝘎𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘴𝘩. Saltmarsh, though, is based on old-school adventures with a loosely-unifying nautical motif. R.C. is a themed book...
That's how we got 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘩, migration of "Okies" to California, and the images of dust-covered impoverished farmers during the Great Depression. Left a scar on the public consciousness, still showing up in media.
I don't think anyone on the team figured that we'd see a literal real-world MAGA movement based on the notion of uncompromisingly embracing the bigotry and imperialism of Americana. Shows that Fallout did strike a very real chord about jingoism and nationalism, though.
... they seem to think that it's a win to just lean right into everything terrible and unironically embrace outdated gaming conceits like bioessentialism and cultural ethical relativism. This is... a bad choice on many levels, so lemme break it down.
Planescape's D&D with a side dish of philosophy. The core game drives you into conflicts via the Factions, each of which has some Thoughts about the nature of reality, the cosmos, and our relation to it.
Like most cyberpunk genre media, in Shadowrun, megacorporations have global reach and influence. The game books include top-ten lists of the largest, wealthiest, most influential corporations, and ideas about what they do and what kinds of cutting-edge research they sponsor.
Cyberpunk aesthetics owe some debts to earlier art forms, both from the punk movement and from underground and futuristic art, like that explored in 𝘔𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘏𝘶𝘳𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘵. (𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘺 𝘔𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘭 magazine for yanks.)
Cyberpunk's root words are: "cyber," which really refers to communication, but was taken from communication between human (bodies) and machines and popularized as talking about synthetic body parts and neural interfaces.