Impeesa
Explorer
Certainly some amount of just playing D&D and trying to map epic fantasy inspirations to high-level rules in my mind (the whole Final Fantasy series springs from a lot of D&D influence and then takes it in this direction), but the early Worship Points System threads almost certainly played a big part. In more recent years, watching movies that touched on the subject matter like Thor: Ragnarok and Moana has kept the dream alive. I also recently read Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness on the recommendation that it is perhaps the only literary work that truly describes epic-level D&D and was not disappointed in that regard, had I read that as a young teen it might also have done the trick.