Question: What books inspired the traits of all the characters?
About the article "Gossip Girl", section "Development".

Candidate passages:
All of the characters are inspired by characters from various video game franchises. 
Each character has the ability to equip traits earned during the game.
Traits give characters a myriad of different bonuses and abilities.
Any trait combination can be equipped as long as they have enough trait slots.
The number of free trait slots depends on their level.
The first virtue trait slot is available at level 7, for example.
Virtue, class and racial traits offer a maximum of five slots, and legendary traits offer three slots.
Traits can be easily changed by visiting a bard found in most towns, and equipping traits costs a certain amount of money.
Types of traits include: Virtue Virtue traits are common amongst all races and classes and can be earned by completing general goals, such as killing a set number of monsters, or completing enough quests in an area.
These traits generally improve stats, resistances and total morale and power, including regeneration.
There are a large variety of goals, and each has multiple levels that can be earned during the course of the game.
Class Class traits are specific to a certain class.
These are generally earned by using a class skill or power often enough, or meeting certain conditions with these skills often enough, such as achieving enough critical strikes with a certain skill.
These skills improve the power of certain abilities and often give an additional passive bonus to character statistics.
Racial Racial traits are specific to each of the races.
These traits confer special abilities or improvements, and only a relatively limited number can be used at one time.
Legendary Legendary traits confer rare bonuses.
They are obtained by collecting class-specific books and their pages which drop from specific enemies, from a series of level 45 class-specific quests, or from combining five class traits of a single type.  
Throughout the storylines, common characters and traits tie the series together. 
As "Redwall" was the first book set in the Redwall world, many of the defining traits of the world had not yet been hammered out, and are different than in all subsequent books in the series: 
After 1975 Ball wrote several comics in New Zealand (for instance 'Nature Calls'), but it was in 1976 that he first published the strip "Footrot Flats" in Wellington's afternoon newspaper, "The Evening Post".
It rapidly led to the demise of his other strips (including 'Stanley' which he was still writing for Punch.
The strip follows the adventures of a working sheep-dog called (if anything) "Dog" or "The Dog" or "@*&#!, his owner Wal Footrot and the other characters, human and animal, that they encounter or associate with.
Ball expresses Dog's thoughts in thought-bubbles, though he clearly remains "just a dog" (rather than the heavily anthropomorphised creatures sometimes found in other comics or animation).
Dog also has alter-egos including "The Grey Ghost" and "The Iron Paw".
Ball's "Footrot Flats" has appeared in syndication in international newspapers, and in over 40 published books.
"Footrot Flats" inspired a stage musical,a theme-parkand New Zealand's first feature-length animated film, "" (1986).
"Footrot Flats" characters include Wal, Dog, Cooch, Cheeky Hobson, Aunt Dolly, Horse, Pongo, Rangi, Charlie, Major, Jess and the Murphy family of Irish and Hunk and Spit.
"Footrot Flats" features several remarkable traits: its expansive created-universe, complete with ancillary characters, things and places; the fact that the characters slowly but perceptibly age and mature throughout the twenty-year run of the comic; and the gradual encroachment of political themes over the years (particularly environmentalism and gentle parodies of feminism).
Ball has said he has always wanted his cartooning to have an impact.
"The heart of a cartoon is the idea, an artist can create a painting, hang it on the wall and be satisfied with what he has achieved even if no-one else sees it.
In cartooning you must get a human reaction to the idea.
The task of the cartoonist is to translate his idea into a drawing that will have impact".