Elric saga

Gygax listed Moorcock in Appendix N, and the borrowing is in the rules rather than the flavour. The Law and Chaos axis of D&D alignment is Moorcock's cosmology, taken up by way of Poul Anderson, which the graph already holds as a source here. The original 1976 Deities & Demigods printed the Melnibonean mythos outright, with Elric and Stormbringer statted, until Chaosium's licence forced its removal from later printings. That removal is the citation: you do not have to withdraw something you did not use.

Michael Moorcock has credited Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword as an influence on Elric: a doomed hero bound to a cursed, soul-drinking black sword, in a world of chaos and fading elder races where the gods are indifferent.

⚠️ This is about HOWARD'S CONAN STORIES, and it is aimed at The Phoenix on the Sword (1932), the first of them, because the graph's other Conan row is a 1967 collection that postdates Elric. Moorcock built Elric as the inversion of Howard's hero and has said so for sixty years. Where Conan is a healthy barbarian with no use for sorcery, Elric is a sickly albino emperor of a decadent civilisation who cannot stand without drugs or the sword, and whose sword eats the people he loves. The relationship runs both ways in the pulp tradition: Moorcock was editing and writing inside the sword-and-sorcery Howard had invented, and Elric only reads as a negation because everything he is not was already the default. Filed MEDIUM because Howard's own influence on the machinery is genuine, and it is the moral shape that is being argued with.