[tarsinge]

D&D world draw heavily from Middle Earth but also from other authors like Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, … The list is officially documented as “Appendix N” in AD&D 1st ed manual[0]

Kind of like Warcraft, I personally started playing around the Warcraft 2 release and it was always kind of the same world of everything medieval fantasy mixed in, never realistic.

[0]https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n...

From the D&D original author:

> The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game.

Edit: citation