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Hunting through my favorite (re used and cheap) book store I stumbled upon Gord The Rogue: Saga of the Old City (from here on out I will refer to it as Saga of the Old City) by Gary Gygax. I had to grab an extra book to get a volume discount, so in went Saga of the Old City. Gary Gxgax has always been a personal hero of mine, guys like him kept guys like me mostly out of trouble and in my parent’s basement rolling polyhedral dice. But as to the quality of writing and game design he was capable of… this purchase was mostly one out of curiosity than any sort of deliberate reading enjoyment.

Saga of the Old City sat on my to-read-pile for a number of months. It is simply a matter of time before any novel in that pile will get read eventually. Be it days, weeks, years or a decade...

As a warning I will be discussing some spoilers as a few snarky people have complained I do not discuss plots in detail. I did not go that far because there are some pleasant surprises in Gygax's plotting, but I did cover the basics of novel's beginning.

So far as the plot goes, it is of a fairly standard fair. Gygax starts with Gord as a child on the mean streets of Greyhawk. Gord shows some initiative to improve his lot in life… okay, stealing from a better part of town. He is immediately busted and thrown in jail. Gord thinks this is better than life on the streets, but really he trades in for a different set of hardships. Again Gord shows initiative to get out of hazardous prison labor and winds up with the beggars guild after being released by a guard on the take to that guild. Gord becomes a thief within this guild until it runs afoul of the thieves’ guild. Gord escapes with another beggar and some money. He then enrolls in school, but once a thief and life in the good districts of Greyhawk does not come cheap… he then infringes on the Thieves’ Guild and flees Greyhawk for Gygax’s larger campaign world.

Saga of the Old City progresses in vignettes like this. It definitely has a feel like sessions in a campaign, but more on the feel of an RPG later on. Much of the novel is focused on Gord becoming an adventurer and picking up skills and experience from various people he runs across. All of these vignettes are well plotted, but almost all suffer from missing a lot of flavor text that could have really improved up Saga of the Old City.

Getting to Gygax’s writing quality. I would say it is less like a novel in some respects than a very good retelling of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Much of the novel would be the back story for Gord , I can imagine an outline on the back of an old orange AD&D character sheet. The back half of the novel feels more party oriented. The book feels like AD&D in regards to character’s progressing, terminology and many of the oddball rules back from the heyday of AD&D. Even a random encounter is thrown into the plot, which was one of my favorite parts of the novel. None of this is bad, it took me back to a time everything was new and exciting in RPG’s.

There is a feeling that Gygax was writing an homage to Fritz Leiber, which so far as old school fantasy goes… is a good thing. Gygax was not quite the same caliber of writer as Lieber however. While Saga of the Old City book flows… it may be a bit too efficient. It is lacking flavor text in places that would have greatly benefitted Gord’s adventures. One good thing about the tone Gygax did set in the novel is that it is written for a more mature audience. Saga of the Old City is in no way is juvenile like other D&D properties in the 80’s, like the animated Saturday morning cartoon.

Additionally I am not certain Gary Gygax ever hear any sort of real swearing in his life, some of the colorful language in Saga of the Old City is amazingly awkward. But that comes back to Gygax’s writing style and position in the publishing business. Saga of the Old City while a fun read, probably needed more work to be published by an author who did not own his own publishing company. Saga of the Old City is close to professional, but it needed a good work through by an editor and some parts sorely needed expanding.

Also of note, Gygax’s love affair with pole arms does make it into Saga of the Old City… There is an appendix where Gygax discusses the AD&D mechanics and how they related to the novel. Gygax also reveals which character he played, but I won’t give that away.

For a fantasy reader, Saga of the Old City is probably not worth picking up on its own merits. That is not to say it is bad, but unless they are a gamer, it is not so good that it must be picked up and read. There are simply many, many more better choices for the fantasy fan who is not a gamer.

For the gamer who also enjoys reading fantasy, Saga of the Old City is a novel worth checking out. It gives insite into the man who started this hobby I have grown to love over the decades. But Saga of the Old City also reads like an well written summary of a campaign that any of us would have given our eye teeth to play in.