HP Lovecraft
The demonic invasion of Azeroth seems to have some parallels and inspirations in HPL fiction. Wherever possible I should exploit this connection (characters, powers, naming, histories, theme, madness).
Arkham Horror
My boardgame group has latched onto this game recently, and we've been having a great deal of fun with it. Of course this game was also inspired by HPL, but there are some mechanics in the game that are quite inspirational. I like the narrative quality of the game, and the gate/monster spawning elements, as well as the web like graph of the city.
Jack Vance
One of my favorite authors, I love his witty dialogue and clever writing style. I’ll attempt to capture some of his incredible verbiage and imaginative naming, setting, and character development.
Sefirot, the Tree of Life
For the map lay-out I will change graph significantly from DotA, since so many AoS games have already used the three lane approach.
I want asymmetry to be important to the experience, with demon giants smashing through hordes of human soldiers.
As-is this the tree is a bit too large for this kind of game, so breaking it down and removing some edges/nodes will not only make the game tighter, it will also make for a cool allegorical tie in!
A promising configuration is to collapse Da’at and Yesod onto Tif’eret. The demon hordes main gate is at Keter and the Human hearth is at Malkhut.
