So, there’s a lot of content on GHO that’s fan-published content … and most all of them have been writing for GH since the early-to-mid 1990s.
One particular author, Krista B. Siren, developed a site called Gord’s Greyhawk, which is devoted to the novels by Gary Gygax in the Gord the Rogue series. This was all before Wikipedia (or MediaWiki sites) were ever even a thing! This was back when HTML1 was merely called “HTML”. :P She indexed every single Proper Noun in the books, and cross-linked every Name, Place, or Thing to every other page it related to.
She carefully evaluated each novel and wrote pages and pages of cross-linked information which were very precisely detailed and are a multi-faceted look at the entire Flanaess.
Krista wrote a short autobiography for our readers, describing her gaming journey and how it led him to GH!
Take a read, and see what she has to tell us about herself!!
From Krista:
“I first started playing D&D out of the Moldvay/Cook Basic & Expert sets in the summer of 1981 as I entered fourth grade. Some of my friends at school had been playing the year before & my dad had picked up the Basic Set around the time it came out and it lay sitting on our shelves. The Caves of Chaos while not set on Oerth, was the first time I encountered Gary Gygax’s designs.
It wasn’t long before my friends & I had run characters up through the upper levels of the expert set and were looking for the promised “Companion” rules and wound up purchasing the first edition of AD&D instead. I got in on that early enough to buy the original version of Deities and Demigods with the Cthulhu Mythos in it and before Fiend Folio had come out. Soon we were taking on giants, plumbing the Vault of the Drow, assailing the Slave Lords, retrieving the Soul Gem from the Ghost Tower of Inverness, and recovering the Black Razor from under White Plume Mountain. In 1983, in fifth grade my friend Elizabeth (Ellis Avery) was DMing – I wasn’t a regular part of her campaign as she lived a mile away – and she told me that all of the modules were found in the same world, Oerth, The World of Greyhawk.
Putting it together
I had already started piecing together hints of the multiverse that EGG’s campaign must have occupied. Hints from the descriptions of the artifacts in the 1st ed. DMG, and the names of some of the spells. I soon had my own copy of the ‘83 WoG boxed set – I think Elizabeth had the earlier folio edition. I wasn’t a regular Dragon reader yet, or I would have seen more of the campaign detailed there. I bought EGG’s first Greyhawk novels in 85 and 86 when I was in 7th and 8th grade. Eclavdra, Obmi, Mordenkainen, Melf, Iggwilv, all appeared. Hints of the bigger world than had made it into the modules was coming out.
As I entered high school, I had heard that there was finally a Castle Greyhawk module coming out and didn’t realize that EGG had been removed from TSR and that it would be a joke module. Once I figured out that, and that a Greyhawk City description would not be forthcoming that was any reflection of Gygax’s version, I began to root through the Gord novels, to take notes and begin to flesh out my Greyhawk campaigns. Gygax’s stories set within the city of Greyhawk (or in Stoink) and pairing Gord with Chert were clear nods to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories and I had been using TSR’s Lankhmar city, with modifications as a baseline for Greyhawk in my campaign, but now with both TSR novels and the first few Trigee/New Infinities ones, I began to shift my model.
By the time I entered college in 1990, I had about 40 pages of notes in an MSWord file on my Mac SE/30, and began using them extensively in the campaigns I ran then. Meanwhile my college era girlfriend ran parallel campaigns set in the Forgotten Realms & we occasionally had crossovers.
Beginnings of In-depth research
Also in high school I had begun a personal quest to learn and more of the roots of modern fantasy literature. From the more immediate past that meant earlier non-Tolkien fantasy of the sort that appeared in Gygax’s list in the back of the DMG or were published in the Lin Carter edited Ballentine Adult Fantasy series, but it also included legends such as the Matter of Britain, and the Matter of France, as well as the fantastic tales of Alf Laylah wa Laylah – the Thousand Nights and a Night as translated by Richard Burton, and further back into myths, particularly ones from cultures less commonly explored than Greece, Egypt, the Norse. In my college library I began reading up on Mesopotamian myths, and in ‘92 took an anthropology class which included a paper on Sumerian mythology. It was early days for the internet and I was an avid contributor to the alt.mythology newsgroup on Usenet. I soon converted that paper into a regularly posted FAQ on Sumerian Mythology. I was attending MIT (as a planetary science major) and as students we had some of the earliest access to the World Wide Web and the ability to craft our own web pages, so in the fall of 1993, shortly before AOL connected to the internet & before Yahoo was formed, I turned that FAQ into what may have been the first but certainly the most extensive of the time web page on Sumerian mythology. The advantage of using internal links on the web page was somewhat novel and while the experience of following a chain of ideas from within say, a series of Wikipedia articles is fairly common today, it was much less so 28 years ago.
In short order, I acquired source books to develop new pages and FAQs for other Near Eastern mythologies including Assyro-Babylonian, Canaanite, and Hittite, and became very systematic in combing through those texts, organizing the information and building them into descriptions of the deities, heroes, and cosmology of those cultures, as well as extensively hyperlinking them. I also maintained a more general collection of Myths and Legends links to sites. Since they were among the earliest pages on those topics, they also wound up being the top linked sites on those topics throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s (until around the time Wikipedia came online).
When I was in graduate school (for physics, and then for teaching) at UNH in the mid to late 1990s, I began turning the same level of attention to my Gord-saga notes and in the process doubling or tripling the length of the word doc. I started adding other references to Greyhawk, Greyhawk Castle, Oerth, and even mythic references as far as denizens of the outer planes were concerned. I raided the 1974 edition of the D&D rules, first edition AD&D rulebooks and modules, and back issues of Dragon Magazines I had collected over the years, I found Greytalk and the Oerth Journal, and some of Rob Kuntz’s writings that expanded on some of the topics as well.
Talking with Gary Gygax
I found Gary Gygax contributing to some RPG forums online – I no longer remember who contacted whom first. I think I e-mailed him and asked permission to put my notes online – I think I had already had them up in a test form while adding in all the internal links. He gave me the OK and also asked me if it was ok if he directed inquiries about Gord book details to me and my pages (to which I assented, although I don’t think he needed to have my permission on that one regardless). I wish I had saved copies of those e-mails, but they were lost when I graduated.
After I graduated, becoming a high school physics teacher in Massachusetts, the pages moved from the pubpages/cisunix site at UNH, to Verizon/Bellatlantic, and later to Comcast as I moved and switched ISPs. A few years back, Comcast dropped their subscriber web pages and, while I had some ambitions of changing them into Google Site pages, the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive has been the only way to get to them recently… Until now!”
– Krista Siren
Absolutely fascinating, Krista!!
Thanks so much for sharing this with us!!
Take a gander at Gord’s Greyhawk. More and more of Krista’s pages are continually being tweaked on the site, giving them a little better layout and readability and will keep going ’til all of her pages have been indexed!
Also, always take a look at the Great Library of Greyhawk, whenever you have questions about the World of Greyhawk!
‘Til the starbreak!
