Saga of Old City - My First Experience with Greyhawk

Saga of Old City was the first official novel for the Greyhawk setting. Other works, such as Quag Keep, had been set in an early version of the Greyhawk world. Gary Gygax, who created the World of Greyhawk and wrote Saga of Old City, decided to write the Gord the Rogue novels, of which Saga of Old City is the first, after the success of Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance books showcasing the Dragonlance setting. 

Original cover by Clyde Caldwell

Young Gord the Gutless is our protagonist. He is poor and well established in pauperhood when we meet him. He has two coins, and they are not even copper, just iron. The start is reminiscent of other tales I’ve read of young orphans that steal and live in the streets, barely surviving and not even truly living. I was surprised how much Gygax’s prose was actually fine, I was expecting worse. 

From the streets, to jail, to the hands of the Beggarmaster, Gord goes swiftly. From the first page you know this is not a kids book. Dragonlance was pretty gentle, and maybe could pass for younger audiences, though it was definitely adult as well, comparatively Saga of Old City is gruesome and harsh; though not gross or disturbing. It’s definitely a coming of age to start, rather than a grand epic.

While I found Dragonlance more epic than your average Forgotten Realms tale, The World of Grehawk is less epic. It is essentially a Sword & Sorcery setting. It's rather low in fantasy, and full of decaying civilization of humanity. One example I think illustrates
this well is that the Thieves Guild of Greyhawk is a legal venture, assuming no one gets caught and pays the tithe from stolen coin and goods to the City Council.

Gord’s coming of age somewhat reminds me of Elminster’s, though it’s really just reminiscent of the trope in general. Chapters often skip a few years and shortly we have a young adult Gord getting into trouble. Don't worry, more than half of the story Gord is an adult.

It was great fun getting to explore a little of the Flanaess, basically the Faerûn equivalent being a portion of the continent of Oerik. We experience the world through the eyes of Gord who is seeing the places for the first time. Our character Gord is exactly as described: a rogue. He’s a thief, though not really evil, he serves himself. The plot kind of follows this random going-ons of his life, which is to say its all over the place.

The rogues in this are awesome, and I particularly love their impersonation skills. It’s nice because they just need to execute the act extremely well, and don’t need to bypass a ton of magic as there is low amounts of magic and even lowish amounts of people not human. 

2008 republished version

We do have some other characters in this, my favorites being Chert and Gellor. And while relative a story of human affairs, we do see a sea serpent, a demon, and a wolfwere.

When a large group fight breaks out near the end of the book, you really can see Gygax’s wargaming experience come through in stratagem and all the particular names for weapons of all sorts, along with the specific types of armor being worn. 

Overall, this is such a fun adventure of one small thief from Old City. The story is often told in such a way that the narrator tells of the next leg of the journey at the start of a chapter before then describing how Gord got there, and then continuing with what came after he was in the predicament. It is also extremely 1e AD&D with thief ranks, bards and what not. 

“A bard has something to do with druidical studies?” 

The last couple chapters really bring the story full circle and it ends very nicely. While the plot is kind of a mystery with this novel, I do believe some things seen here will show up for the rest of the series of Gord the Rogue. It was a fun ride, and I’d recommend just going with it, let Gord take you on the adventures of his young life. There are six more books after this one and I do plan on reading them all at some point.

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You can track my current progress here.

What was the first Dungeons & Dragons novel?

For over four decades fantastic Dungeon & Dragons novels have been published for the publics reading pleasure. For over thirty years, we’ve had novels set in the Forgotten Realms, but before the Realms became the flagship setting, there were novels for other settings, such as Dragonlance and Greyhawk.

To explore the origins of the D&D novel line, we should first touch on the campaign settings that constitute the published fantasy worlds of D&D today. The first official setting was Blackmoor in 1971, three years before OD&D was released. This was David Arneson’s world for his wargames and early D&D games. One year later, in 1972, Greyhawk started taking shape. Beyond creating these original settings, Arneson and Gygax are the co-creators of D&D as a whole. 

So back in 1978, D&D was rather young, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons --the more direct ancestor to the current fifth edition-- was not quite a thing. While some fiction, particularly a novella published in pieces in the first editions of Dragon Magazine, had already been released, 1978 was the chosen year for the first full length novel. The author would be none other than Andre Norton, winner of a Gandalf Grand Master award, SFWA Grand Master award, and an inductee of Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Norton was also featured in Gygax’s famous Appendix N found in the original Dungeon Masters Gyide, which lists the speculative fiction that influenced his D&D works.This novel would be Quag Keep. It came about after Norton played a single session of D&D with Gary Gygax. The novel takes place in Greyhawk, but seeing as The World of Greyhawk wasn’t released until 1980, this is really proto-Greyhawk. 

Before its official setting release in 1980, Greyhawk had been featured in a number of adventures, such as S1 Tomb Of Horrors, S2 White Plume Mountain, and T1 The Village of Hommlet. In 1975 there was also an additional rule set released for Original Dungeons & Dragons by Gygax and Rob Kuntz titled Supplement I: Greyhawk, though it only actually makes two references to Greyhawk.

So Quag Keep, apart from being set in the still forming world of Oerth (the planet of Greyhawk, as Toril is for the Forgotten Realms), was also quite different from subsequent D&D novels. It’s an odd sort of portal fantasy, a type of fantasy with the most popular example being CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. People from our world are somehow, in a magical way, transported to fantasy-land. The plot here is really interesting, as in Quag Keep, instead of coming to Greyhawk just as normal mundane persons from Earth, in this case they take the place of the fictional D&D characters, specifically ones designed by a new miniature company. Somehow this company transports the players into this fictional world for real. The novel actually features dice, attached to an un-removable brace on each of the seven characters. These dice roll during key moments of fate. The players/characters are bound by geas to complete their quest, this geas bringing the unlikely companions together. There is also an interesting take on alignment, which involves certain smells that go with people of chaos or law.

It's an odd mix of science and fantasy, and the blurb on the back even describes it as so; along with calling D&D a wargame, which may seem odd to those who know it as "the world's greatest role-playing game" (See Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity for more on this). At the end of the novel, many questions are left unanswered, though there is a sequel where some could be answered: Return to Quag Keep was released in 2006 by Andre Norton posthumously and Jean Rabe.

Being the fist novel for D&D marks Quag Keep as a special book. Its success for the medium paved ways for Weis and Hickman's premier Dragonlance novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight, in 1984 and the first Forgotten Realms novel by Douglas Niles in 1987: Darkwalker on Moonshae.

I read Quag Keep in my off time from posting in the last few months after finding it for $2 at a used bookstore. I have yet to read the sequel, but I would like to eventually, and I'm interested to see if it continues along in the proto-Greyhawk world, or in the later more fleshed out and final version.

What was your first D&D novel? Have you read Quag Keep? Let me know! My next article I hope to explore some of the lore and other things that can be had in the upcoming release of the video game Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. I would also like to take a moment to notify any readers that I will now be posting on the first and third Mondays of every month to put less of a burden on my already busy schedule. I may also throw in bonus posts every now and then, so keep an eye out.

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You can track my current progress here.