It would be hard to overestimate the contribution to popular culture that has been made by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. They were the two designers who cooked up the popular pencil and paper role-playing game known as Dungeons & Dragons. Released in 1974 and originally sold in the form of three tiny pamphlets, the game graduated from the Basic Set of rules to the more familiar and gargantuan Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977-1979) and finally to the 3rd Edition (2000), which is now used as a bedrock platform for innumerable computer and console games.
They didn’t create medieval fantasy or even medieval fantasy gaming, but without them, our fantasy life in movies, literature and gaming entertainment would be so much more restricted. People understand the meaning of hit points and 20-sided die and instantly grok the concept of a doughty band of adventurers exploring caves for treasure and meeting up with fire-breathing dragons and mystical elves. Oh, I know Tolkien and Peake and Dunsany and a million others came before them, but D&D made you participate. It fired your junior high school imagination like algebra class never could. And it was interactive in a way that even reading a book about the subject could not be.
And that’s why literature that has derived directly from D&D adventures is usually a bit insipid. There haven’t been the classic boundary-breaking novel that seamlessly meshes good writing with interactive gaming elements (and no, I don’t think we can count the CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books). One person who might have been able to accomplish this was Andre Alice Norton.
Norton, one of the leading lights of science fiction with more than 100 titles to her credit and an award named after her presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, first tried her pen at a D&D tale with 1978’s QUAG KEEP. Sadly, the new sequel, RETURN TO QUAG KEEP, written with Jean Rabe, is perhaps the last book we will see from Norton, who died in March of 2005.
Unfortunately, there are issues. For starters, there are too many characters who we end up meeting in a dark alley. There’s the priest Deav Dyne, the lizardman Gulth, the bard Wymarc, the elf Ingrge, and the fighters Yevele, Naile and Milo. The first two are quickly packed off on an unrelated adventure before the story completely bogs down, but even so, we’re off to a plodding start.
The storyline thuds along peppered with dull descriptions and improbable dialogue. You can almost hear a mediocre Gamemaster intone, “You enter a tavern. It’s very dirty. There are some people on stools. They look tough.” This is a shame because there is an interesting premise behind the story. All of the characters are not actually native to this world; they are our contemporaries, but were sucked into this fictionalized medieval land when they touched an enchanted gaming miniature. Thankfully, they have acquired the powers of the characters they once played. Having a sword fight with the abilities of a pizza delivery guy means a quick visit to the graveyard.
But this isn’t fully explored. A novelistic examination of interactive gaming and how it meshes with what seems to be the real world for these characters could have gone a long way to making the book more than a simple adventure story. Instead, when the subject is broached, some of the characters complain they can already feel their “old” life slipping away. Other characters refuse to talk about their prior history point blank. Occasionally, a character will wax rhapsodic about 20th-century life, but there never seems to be a connection or a spark between their past and current lives. How has the New York lawyer not only decided to play a shapeshifting creature named Naile, but what does it mean to him to do so, both in the game and now in the only real world he inhabits? This lack of true introspection may be because prior material has been discussed in QUAG KEEP, but for new readers, to shovel this aspect of the “player characters” under the rug seems a lost opportunity.
And their duality of character is important, because along about the 70th page, something happens that’s really quite unexpected. And you start to care. Will this band ever be able to return home? Or will they have to make this new land their home? And if they return, can they reassimilate? What about friends they’ve left behind? And just how do they plan on stopping the evil they encounter here? Is there a correlation of that evil in their 20th- century time? Some of those questions are answered, some aren’t. One wonders if maybe Ms. Norton was tired or ill when working on this title.
But with all that, there is something to say that is good about the book. It’s a decent simple adventure tale along the lines of “then this happened, then this happened.” If you’re not expecting more, this literary romp is similar to a dungeon crawl in an online computer game. Not always satisfying, but entertaining enough when you just want a little fantasy in your life. And it’s suitable for adolescent readers as long as they’re not put off by blood and death.
There will be no more visits to QUAG KEEP for Norton, but Rabe still writes in the DRAGONLANCE series of D&D-inspired adventures, and I’m sure she can continue this line if it sells well. After all, the legacy of Gygax, Arneson, +1 swords and a bunch of oddly shaped dice is as unstoppable as a bulette on a rampage. Yes, I know: D&D geek, and glad to be one. –Mark Rose
Buy it at Amazon.
Related posts:
- Exalted: The Carnelian Flame
- Happy New Year from BOOKGASM
- Martin’s fantasy series becomes online game
- Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy
- BOOK WHORE >> 9.6.05
