Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific pulp fiction author from America who wrote extensively from 1911 through to his death in 1950. Whilst mostly remembered as the creator of Tarzan, he was also a huge author in the fields of Sword & Sorcery and its Science Fantasy counterpart "Sword & Planet". He can be considered one of the creators of the Underdark as one of the original and certainly most well-known "Hollow Earth" writers as well. Whilst his library is vast, there are several distinct settings worth noting amongst his works.

His Works

Tarzan

The most well-known of Burroughs' creations, Tarzan is a classic "two-fisted tale"; pulpy action-adventure set in darkest Africa, centered around an English nobleman's son whose parents died when he was a baby and who survived because he was taken in by a tribe of quasi-human apes called "Mangani" - later reworked in other media as gorillas, who in the original novel were portrayed as monstrous brutes known as "Bolgani". Tarzan frequently encountered strange ruins and the remnants of lost civilizations, and even weird sorceries. He also had a crossover with one of Burroughs' later pulp worlds, in the form of Pellucidar.

Barsoom

Arguably Burroughs' most famous work after his Tarzan books, the Barsoom library is more formally known as the John Carter of Mars series, for some rather self-explanatory reasons. It revolves around an adventurous Virginian man named John Carter, who is somehow mentally projected to Mars - a dying world of red deserts and rocky badlands inhabited by myriad alien races, who collectively refer to their world as "Barsoom". Filled with a spirit of adventure and a "good ol' boy" sentiment, and granted superhuman strength by Barsoom's lighter gravity, John Carter becomes a great leader who rescues (and ultimately marries) the princess of the surprisingly human-like "Red Martians", ultimately going on to bring peace to Barsoom by uniting its once-warring cultures as the Warlord of Mars.

Amtor

Also known as the Carson of Venus series, the Amtor library is basically a retread of the Barsoom books, taking place instead on Venus - its most unusual trait is that, rather than the depiction of Venus as a Jurassic-like world of tropical rainforests, swamps and warm seas that is common to pulp fantasy, Amtor has a much more varied climate, including glaciers; the books take place within an area that lies in Amtor's tropical region, however, so it seems to play it straight. Its starring character is Carson Napier, who attempted to physically travel to Mars in a rocket but made a mistake and crashlanded on the primitive and vibrantly lethal world of Venus instead.

Pellucidar

Burroughs' truest Sword & Sorcery work, the Pellucidar books revolve around a band of scientific explorers who burrow their way into the core of the earth, revealing it to be hollow and home to an interior sun that provides eternal day over a land filled with primitive human cultures, dinosaurs, prehistoric animals and weird monsters. The most notable of these are the malevolent Mahars, a race of man-eating psychic pterodactyls.

Caspak

Setting of a set of novels collectively known as "The Land that Time Forgot", Caspak is an island that exists outside of time, populated with a collection of humanoids and animals from different eras of prehistory. The novels themselves center around two parties - our band of heroic English protagonists and the crew of a German U-boat - who stumble into Caspak during World War 1 and then must play a cat-and-mouse game with each other and the terrible monsters native to the island to escape.

/tg/ Influence

Aside from being one of the fantasy authors who inspired Gygax to write Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, Burroughs has two particular areas of influence on D&D. Firstly, the Hollow World subsetting for Mystara is almost a 1-for-1 copy of Pellucidar, even sharing the trait of being linked to the outer world by huge openings at the poles that a skilled airship pilot can sail through. Secondly, Dark Sun is set on a world that can basically be described as a grimdark take on Barsoom. In 2015, Modiphius Entertainment also made an official John Carter of Mars RPG with support from the Burroughs estate which uses their 2d20 system.

Pathfinder used a lot of Barsoom and Amtar in Golarion's sister planets. And, er, so did John Norman in Gor.