Saga of Old City
| Saga of Old City | |
 |
|
| Original cover artwork by Clyde Caldwell. | |
| Type: | Novel |
|---|---|
| Edition: | AD&D 1e |
| Author(s): | Gary Gygax |
| Cover Artist(s): | Clyde Caldwell |
| Interior Artist(s): | Clyde Caldwell |
| Series: | Gord the Rogue |
| Publisher: | TSR, Inc. |
| First Published: | 1985 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| ISBN: | 0-88038-257-0 |
| Class: | Officially published content |
Saga of Old City is a 1985 fantasy novel by Gary Gygax, set in the World of Greyhawk™.
Plot summary[edit | edit source]
Saga of Old City was the first novel to feature Gord the Rogue. Saga of Old City starts in Gord's childhood, and ends with his triumphant return to Greyhawk City as a young man and master thief. He learns his trade in the 'beggars' guild', and gets involved in the gang war touched off by the beggars encroaching on the official thieves' guild's territory. He travels and has a variety of swashbuckling adventures, ranging from participating in a war, to liberating a young noblewoman held hostage, to defeating a demon with a druid, Curley Greenleaf, and a barbarian, Chert.
Publication history[edit | edit source]
Gary Gygax wrote a short story, "At Moonset Blackcat Comes", that appeared in the special 100th issue of Dragon in August 1985. This introduced Gord the Rogue to gamers just before Saga of Old City was scheduled to be released.[1] Saga of the Old City was published in 1985; this and its sequel Artifact of Evil were the only two novels published under TSR's Greyhawk Adventures written by Gygax.
This was Gygax's first novel, and it was edited by Kim Mohan.[2] It was the first Greyhawk-branded novel,[3] but not the first published novel to take place in this world, which was Quag Keep, published in 1978 by Andre Norton.[3]
In 2008 Troll Lord Games released a new hard cover reprinting of Saga of Old City. (at right)
Reception[edit | edit source]
Though Gygax had written numerous adventures prior to his first novel, the plot of Saga of the Old City's shortcomings are often described that it reads like an adventure. And for an era when fantasy novels were exceedingly rare, he wrote what he knew. Unfortunately, that hasn't stood the test of time well.
On Goodreads, reviewer Brian Rogers said, "This isn't technically a "gaming" book because there are no rules or mechanics, but it is, because it's very much AD&D. Not a surprise given its author and publisher. ...Gygax isn't a thrilling prose stylist, but his vocabulary is expansive, his love of the material is clear, and his ability to pastiche the stories of Conan and his contemporaries is solid. That makes it a workable book as a fantasy adventure bildungsroman [a novel dealing with one person's formative years]. ... a series of 20-60 page tales of a young AD&D thief from his childhood and training ...to being a con man, to falling in with fantasy Romany for a while, to political skulduggery in Not-Chicago (Stoink is ruled entirely by thieves, under the control of Boss Dhaley), to wartime encounters to a classic "party of adventurers against a monster" dungeon crawl (easily the weakest part of the book).
... in this age, the casual misogyny is more noticeable. Gygax is writing in 1984, trying to write like he's working for the pulps in the 1930s, and for some reason that makes his treatment of female characters somehow worse than the Conan stories - all of the women are hapless foils or motivational tools, and none of them are as fleshed out as the women who appear in the tales Gygax is striving to emulate. It's a drag on the book overall."[4]
In the Io9 series revisiting older Dungeons & Dragons novels, Rob Bricken commented that "I feel very weird about hating a novel written by the father of Dungeons & Dragons, but there's nothing fantastic about the fantasy in Saga of Old City. It's just deeply, deeply unpleasant. So while I might give the technical writing a 4 on a 1d20—he's more competent at scene and actions descriptions than R.A. Salvatore in The Crystal Shard, at least Salvatore's characters were distinct and memorable—but a penalty of -2, along with a -3 for its outright misogyny. In the end, that leaves Saga of Old City with -1—technically not a critical miss, but still an utter failure."[5]
References[edit | edit source]
Notes[edit | edit source]
Citations[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Gygax, Gary (August 1985). "At Moonset Blackcat Comes". Dragon (100): 22. Lake Geneva WI: TSR.
- ↑ (January 1986). "TSR Profiles". Dragon (#105): 62. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin: TSR, Inc..
- ↑ a b Winter, Steve (October 2004) 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast ISBN: 0-7869-3498-0.
- ↑ Rogers, Brian. Saga of Old City. Goodreads.
- ↑ Bricken, Rob. Dungeons & Dragons & Novels: Revisiting Gary Gygax's Saga of Old Town (in en-us). io9.
Bibliography[edit | edit source]
- Gary Gygax. Saga of Old City. Lake Geneva, WI: TSR, 1985.
| This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors). |
Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index
The Index is based on previous work of Jason Zavoda through '08, and his work as continued and updated by Eric Johnson, Richard DiIoia, Jason "PupickDad" Jacobson, a French fan group, and numerous other fans over the years. The wiki page for the EGI has a list of sources, full product names, abbreviations, and a link to the full, downloadable index.
| Topic | Type | Description | Product | Page/Card/Image
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saga of Old City | Publication | Novel, | Den of Thieves | 90 |
| Saga of Old City | Publication | Novel, | Dragon magazine #100 | 23 |
| Saga of Old City | Publication | Novel, | Dragon magazine #344 | 54 |
| Saga of Old City | Publication | Novel, | Living Greyhawk Journal #2 | 19 |