It is no secret today that the designers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, were influenced by the literature they read and films they watched when they created the Original Role Playing game. Certain ideas seem pulled directly from the pages of a book or the scenes of a movie. Some authors and filmmakers probably had more influence than others in this respect and the fantastic fiction of Poul Anderson appears high on the list of such sources.
Three Hearts and Three Lions is a fantasy tale of Holger Carlsen, an underground fighter against the Nazis during WWII who finds himself transported back in time (?) to a world where the champions of Charlemagne, his famous paladins, are warring against the forces of chaos that seek to overwhelm the civilized world of mankind. There are two themes here that directly appear in the LBBs of the Original Role Playing Game (plus Supplement I) - chaos and the paladin.
Holger finds himself in the role of an armored warrior in this new setting, a paladin to be precise. His behavior is governed by a code and he enjoys certain supernatural abilities as a result of his membership among the elite paladins and adherence to the code, abilities which aid him in holding back the forces of chaos which seek to spread into the world of law and order ruled by Charlemagne. Although the authors do not directly say this book prompted them to include the paladin sub-class, the paladin, as a champion of the forces defending Law will find its way into the game in the form of the Paladin sub-class as described in supplement I Greyhawk.
The concept of ordering the world as a struggle between the forces of Law, representing civilization, order and goodness wherein men flourish and the forces of Chaos being chiefly wildness where spawn those non-human races who would run a-muck spreading violence and disorder and the desire to overthrow man's civilization is a central theme in the game in terms of Alignment. Although no direct link between the game concept and Three Hearts and Three Lions is made by Mr. Gygax and Mr. Arneson, the ideas seem very similar (and the novel first saw publication in 1953), so it seems a fair assumption to me.
Three Hearts and Three Lions features a friendly and helpful dwarf character (seen in the above cover illustration riding double with Holger) who assists Holger in getting his bearings and who is both a familiar trope from fairy tales and similar to the dwarf race described in the LBBs. A dragon and various other creatures of Chaos appear in the story, including a rubbery troll whose wounds and lost limbs rapidly heal and regenerate and a werewolf who haunts a village. The forces of Chaos are perhaps personified in the elf character (villain) Duke Alfric who rules in Faerie-land and leads an army of conquest against the Law-abiding kingdom of Charlemagne.
Poul Anderson was a prolific and popular author who wrote in both the science fiction and fantasy genres. His dark ages saga The Broken Sword is an even more extensive description of his view of faerie and the amoral elf race and like Three Hearts and Three Lions can be seen as an influence upon the Original Adventure Game. High Crusade is a less serious, but highly enjoyable novel which again looks at the conflict between Law and Chaos, this time in a novel about alien space travelers who land in medieval England and wind up having their whole space-faring empire conquered by the local baron and his band of merry Englishmen. Tau Zero is a science fiction tale of interstellar travel which contains a very accessible discussion of near light speed travel and its relationship to time as we understand it. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in gaming space travel.
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