Extra Art Attack

I spent at least a little bit of time this weekend on my phone looking at my Friday Art Attack posts.  Although I move images that I've used on my blog to a "used" folder to keep them from being used again, I found a number of repeats; one image, and it's not even a great one, was used three times!  Either I've forgotten to move it, or I've had the image under more than one file name, or I've found them again and redownloaded them back in to my To Use folder without realizing that I've already had this image before.  I also note that in my earlier posts on this tag, I used fewer images and more text talking about the image.  I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but it is certainly a changed thing.

Anyway, I decided that doing a bonus art attack today isn't a bad idea, and then I'll get around to that book review I promised last week. We'll see if I end up putting lots and lots of pictures with relatively little discussion by me or if I swing back the other direction a bit.

Some more computer game art for undead.  I've actually used a fair bit of Guild Wars undead concept art in various forms over the years; they've got some really great looking undead.  This is less of the undead itself and more of the necromancer who calls them.

A half-orc sailor.  I kinda tend to like half-orcs and other "savage humanoids" illustrated as just normal people around the setting, sometimes.  Because, why not?  Especially in some settings; not so much Golarion, but certainly something like Eberron that'd be true.

A concept art piece of a Han Solo spinoff story of some kind.

I actually kinda prefer harpies with arms, but this is still a nice image, in a real 70s kind of sword & sorcery style.

Happy October, y'all!  I used to try and watch Sleepy Hollow every October, although I missed it more often than not.  I've since decided that that movie isn't really all that good, and I'm pretty much over Tim Burton in general.  Now, I've been meaning to watch the Wolfman remake every October for the last three years or so, but I've also not actually gotten around to doing it.  I'll want to make sure I catch it this year.  But, I don't dislike Sleepy Hollow because I dislike the concept.  I just think that it's mostly a pretty poorly executed movie.

I like spaceships flying through space, but there is something to be said for them entering and leaving the atmosphere, of course.  I imagine they'd be more aerodynamic than these are, but space opera doesn't really quibble too much with reality if it gets in the way of a cool visual.

Another lich with a vaguely Egyptian kind of vibe going on.

Now, in space itself, aerodynamics is pointless, of course, so these are cool looking ships here.

Not quite sure what's happening here. Cyberpunk?  Anyway, these cyborg gypes are attacking the hospital, and people who look kinda sorta like yakuza are fighting back.

A very interesting fantasy parade, or maybe a Roman style Triumph with exotic animals and dinosaurian type things in the parade.

A WAR image from Magic of a hydra.

I could do a lot with this image.  It seems to suggest an awful lot of story, actually.

Friday Art Attack

I've got a book review to write later today (not that anyone will care, given that the book I'm going to review was published almost fifteen years ago, and I believe is currently out of print and only available in used or ebook format.)  But first, I'm pretty sure that I've missed the Friday Art Attacks for two Fridays in a row, so I should definitely do one today before I get distracted by something else and don't yet again!

In fact, given my lack of updates on this series, I probably should do a super big one; so here; more than 50% more images than average!

Machairodus, one of the many saber-toothed cats prior to the one everyone knows from California.  This one was from Eurasia, North America and Africa of the late Miocene.  The North American one was a contender for largest cat who ever lived.

Magnus Robot Fighter, a really cool concept that never really got quite as much traction as it deserved.  Although an indie comic book still hangs out there and has for a long time.

Chinese Middle-Late Jurassic; a little earlier than the Morrison of North America, but still showing a broadly similar "aspect."  This is an image of the Mamenchisaurus Assemblage in the Junggar Basin with Guanlong and Yinlong in the foreground.

The Columbian Mammoth, which if it had lived just a little bit longer, we'd probably have just called the American Elephant.  Remember that mammoths are two things: 1) not necessarily woolly, except for of course the woolly mammoth itself, and 2) more closely related to Asian elephants than even African elephants are.  They are very firmly nested as a family member of the modern elephants that we just barely happened to miss.  The Columbian mammoths range covered most of what is today the lower 48 and Mexico, and in the southern portions of that range, they're certainly just as tropical as the habitats of elephants today in Africa and Asia.

Sigh.  North American megafauna, you have no idea how much I miss you!  Although if you were still around, maybe I'd hike and camp less...

A digital model of a Conan style man-ape.  Or, in DARK•HERITAGE, a thurse.  In many other settings, why not a sasquatch or something too?

This on the other hand, is the batman character Man-bat, which also works as a vampire in his batty morph, I think.

In honor of the soon to launch The Mandalorean show, here's this.  It'll probably still suck, because it is, after all, Disney SJW Wars, not Star Wars as it once was, but I can't look away.

Although I probably won't watch it when it's new.  I presume it'll get DVD releases eventually, and I'll check it out from my local public library or something.

What can I say?  This map makes me laugh.  I'd probably actually use this seting, though.

The artist of this barbarian is Polish, so I can maybe suspect that it's not meant to represent one of my specific ancestors.  Then again, if you go back far enough, my ancestors in the Corded Ware culture probably spread from this general area, the Nordic Bronze Age went way out into the Baltic territory, and even the Vikings interacted with (and probably intermingled with) plenty of Wends, and even Cnut the Great's mother was probably Polish.  The English (and their descendant populations, like the Americans) should probably look at the Poles as kinda long-lost distant cousins rather that completely alien foreigners.

Yes!  I could have sworn I've used this before, but it's still in my folder suggesting it hasn't been, so maybe I had another copy under another file name.  LOVE this image, though.  I love undead.

The same is true for this, but the mining of ... something or other on Mars, is a cool image.

And who doesn't love retrofuturistic 80s style stylized cyberpunk art?

Maul the barbarian?  I dunno.  This character, along with Boba Fett, was criminally underused and ill-used, for that matter, by George Lucas, and criminally over-used and equally ill-used by subsequent writers.

Another great Warhammer miniature that is begging to be used by other fantasy settings in some way or other; although the combination of little and big arms gives me a kind of D&D glabrezu vibe.  I actually built my Typhon daemon stats around the idea of this miniature.

A couple of old-fashioned but still very awesome sci-fi pieces by David Hardy.  The latter one was the cover of a book that I used to love at the library, and which I bought used when I saw it sitting at a used book store not too long ago.  It was done in late '77 or early '78, I think, and it has some... obvious inspiration involved.

More undead and the necromancers who love them.

Another very 60s/70s style piece of sci-fi art.  Man, I loved that era for science fiction sometimes.

I'm not quite sure that making Medusa look sultry and sexy really makes sense; she was supposed to be so ugly that she turned men to stone, and no, I don't mean it like that.  Still, not that she isn't a fictional character, obviously, but it's hard not to feel a little sorry for Medusa.  Fifth century Greeks started to suggest that maybe she was beautiful as well as terrible and portrayed her less as a monster and more as a victim of the fickleness of the Gods.  Herodotus suggests that the myth originated in the Bronze or early Iron Age Berbers of North Africa, and there is a suggestion that it represents a quasi-historical reality; an invasion of Hellenes which profaned the temples of some goddess and stripped her priestesses of their masks (and presumably raped them, or something.)

Either way, while I was initially hesitant to use Medusa, and I'm not quite sure why now, I've since added a great deal of Classical Mythological content to DARK•HERITAGE, and I kinda like the setting with some of that.  Medusa is the mother of the medusae, lesser versions, of course, as well as the snakemen, in my setting.  I don't have stats for Medusa the original, but medusae are dangerous (and rare) enough.

A Wayne Reynolds Mephistopheles piece from Paizo, although there's a similar one from WotC of the same character also by WAR, curiously, if I remember correctly.

Sigh.  If only you could take one of these safaris.

There's a long tradition of making vampires seductive and sexy as well as evil and monstrous, but this one looks more like some kind of inhuman monster raping a woman.  Maybe that's a more apt metaphor for the vampire anyway.

A type of D&D bug demon called a mezzoloth, or mezzodaemon, depending on the edition.

Another stylized 80s piece of art.  I really love this kind of stuff, but then again, I'm certainly a product from a pop culture perspective, of the 80s.  Through and through.

Another weird interesting piece of demon art.

Not sure how this meme got stuck in my regular image folder, and it's certainly a bit out of date now.

Shortly after the Gillette flap, my wife, who does the shopping for our family, replaced my sons' Gillette razors with Schick ones.  I already was a Schick user.

I dunno what this means, exactly, but it's a cool image.  And everyone loves a hot naked woman.

Speaking of which, here's one of Frazetta's iterations of the Moon Maid cover art.  There's actually more than one version of this with somewhat subtle differences, and it's fair to say that it has become one of the artists more iconic illustration; even though the book that it's a cover for is not one of the authors' more iconic works.

Happy Halloween, y'all!  I love October.  It's my favorite month of the year, actually.

And finally, a Musketeer-type character illustration.  A classic swashbuckling archetype of this kind is one of my favorite kinds of characters.

Depeche Mode Five Questions: Some Great Reward

Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?

1984's Some Great Reward were when Depeche Mode really finally kinda evolved into the Depeche Mode everyone in the 80s thinks that they were.  They were musically more mature, with an extremely unique sound; very dark, moody and often aggressive pop music made in many ways like industrial music was, except with pop song structure, and a string of hits that were a bit indie still in most respects.  They were accessible, but not too accessible.  While Depeche Mode of the first two or three albums were described as fresh-faced nice boys, I doubt anyone would say that about Depeche Mode of this era, with their kind of morally subversive hints at S&M and aggressive religious questioning, black leather and studs, and generally a much more "bad boy" approach.

It's funny, though—the exact same people who usually say that Some Great Reward is much more mature, also clearly point to teen angst as its primary overarching theme, and teen angst is... by definition... very immature.  For many years, because I really liked the music, I made excuses and apologias for the themes, assuming that there must be a kind of allegorical vibe to the themes, and maybe there is.  Martin Gore doesn't exactly go around discussing the meaning of his songs.  But the more I think about it, the more I think that most likely the songs mean what they seem to mean, and the boys from Basildon just enjoyed being kinda bratty and rebellious.  It wasn't mature, and in fact, thematically this particular album has aged poorly because of it; or rather, it doesn't mean very much to me anymore.  Although I do still think that the music is brilliant, so there's that.

I still prefer Black Celebration and Music For the Masses, but this is the first Depeche Mode album that I really like.  It still has lots of Alan Wilder's brilliant touches in the production (he also wrote a song on the album, as well as a B-side to People Are People).  The themes, looking back at them now, seem kinda embarrassingly sophomoric.  But it is what it is; when I was 17 or so back in the late 80s and very earliest 90s, I loved this album, and I still have a lot of nostalgia about it even so.

Anyway, to the questions:

1) This is actually a tough one.  The album only has nine tracks, and they all kind of fit to create an almost symphonic whole, and this is probably the only of almost every DM album where there isn't one that I wish I could leave off.  That said, I have to pick something, so either It Doesn't Matter or Stories of Old are the more forgettable of the tracks here.  Of the two... urgh.  Stories of Old, I guess.  It's a toss-up.

2) Depeche Mode was consistently radical about a lot of things by this time.  I think Blasphemous Rumours, especially as a single release, with it's really bizarre sounds, almost complete lack of percussion, etc. probably deserves the nod.  Not because of the theme; as a Christian myself, I've seen people ask those kinds of questions routinely when they're twelve years old, and if at ten years older than that, they still think those are deep questions to doubt faith because of stuff like that, you're just spiritually and emotionally quite immature.  But as an emotional and sonic achievement, the song is really something else.

3) I'm sure it's People Are People.  Not only did I listen to it on the radio when it was new (although at the time, I wasn't paying nearly as much attention to music, so I didn't even know who it was) but I also had the fix-up compilation album People Are People too, and I had the 12" on vinyl pretty early.  Plus, c'mon.  It's really classic.  I've never understood why the band themselves don't like this song very much and avoided playing it for years.

4) Curiously, Alan Wilder isn't well known as a song-writer; he penned two songs on the earlier album, one on this, and a few b-sides, at least some of which were instrumentals anyway.  He doesn't even think of himself as much of a song writer.  But for Some Great Reward, I think the one track he penned, If You Want, is my favorite, and it grew into my favorite fairly early.

To be fair, I don't listen to this stuff as much as I used to.  It's been the better part of two decades since I really had loads of Depeche Mode in regular rotation, even though they were so pivotal to the formation of my taste in music in so many ways.  So, I haven't necessarily changed the songs that I like best in a long time.

5) Nine out of ten.  One of the best.  I only mark it down because of the preponderance of embarrassingly juvenile themes and thinking that they were deep or something.

Depeche Mode Five Questions: Construction Time Again

Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?

Construction Time Again is a transitional album, although honestly, you could say that about almost all of the Depeche Mode albums; they were rarely content to retread what they had just done.  If A Broken Frame was Martin Gore's first effort, and portions of it were him trying to still sound like Vince Clark, intermingled with his own early song-writing sensibilities, Construction Time is him feeling both more confident and experienced at song writing, and yet also veering off into a tangent thematically, talking a lot about a bunch of strange socio-economic and political themes, although doing so in a deliberately vague way.  Importantly, it is also the album where Depeche Mode brought sampling and innovative recording to the mainstream; working with Gareth Jones, but not in a musique concrete kind of way; the techniques used by Einsturblahblahblah Neubaten (Collapsing New Buildings.  That I can say.  Although it tends to get the Fad Gadget song stuck in my head when I do.)

But it never sounded (to me, at least) like Depeche Mode had "arrived" at their classic iteration quite yet.  Maybe that's not fair, and maybe it's an artifact of how I came into Depeche Mode a little later in the 80s, and Construction Time Again was back catalog by the time I got it, but maybe it's also because some of their experimentation was a little odd; it was fun to see them experimenting, but some of those experiments were best... not repeated, maybe.  I, of course, first heard Depeche Mode when People Are People was popular enough to be on the radio, but it wasn't until Strangelove was on the radio that I really got into them and went and started buying their stuff.  Music For the Masses was my first Depeche Mode album (and it was still pretty new at the time in 1988 or so) and to me, the triptych of Some Great Reward, Black Celebration and Music For the Masses was the fully matured Depeche Mode sound.  (I'm one of the very few DM fans who actually think Violator was a step-backward into some hoakiness on occasion, and bad production (single versions of many of their tracks were better than the album versions.)  To me, Construction Time Again was a weird little detour on their way to Some Great Reward.  Although obviously, it has some great tracks, especially the timeless classic Everything Counts.

1) This is actually surprisingly tough.  I really don't much like Pipeline, but at the same time, I appreciate the innovation in it.  Just based on how much I like it, I think this one needs to go, but in terms of maybe tracks that don't do anything "new" or particularly interesting, but are just solid album tracks, I'd probably have to say Two Minute Warning or More Than a Party more deserves the cut.  Can I punt and say Get the Balance Right, which they did cut?  I know, I know.  I'll go with Pipeline; it would have been just as innovative as a b-side, I suppose.

2) I think either Pipeline or Told You So counts here.  Pipeline was probably more innovative in that it didn't even bother having a melody or stuff like that, which wasn't necessarily a great concept of an experiment.  Told You So is really frantic and very kind of interesting and unlikely for what ended up being a single release, at least in some regions.

3) Well, clearly Everything Counts is the one I've heard the most.  It's the most accessible, and it was released twice (live version in 1988 from 101).  They also end pretty much every concert with it.  I haven't necessarily tried to hear it the most, but I have regardless.

4) My favorite song, for many years, has been The Landscape Is Changing.  The switch into a different instrumental coda has always sounded great to me.  But... for many years?  Still today?  I'm not sure.  That's a tough call.  And Then... is surprisingly iconic to me too; it's a great track, and the album wouldn't be the same without it being in the place that it is in the album.  And at the end of the day, Everything Counts still hasn't gotten tired or stale to me yet, in spite of a bit of cheesiness in the theme.  I think when all is said and done, I'll actually pick that one: Everything Counts.

5) I don't know that it's improved on A Broken Frame, in terms of how easy is it to listen to.  It's more mature in some ways, and stretches in interesting ways, but in other ways, that didn't necessarily make it any better.  So, so far, all three of the first Depeche Mode albums get the same rating, seven out of ten.

Depeche Mode Five Questions: A Broken Frame

Once again, the five questions are:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?

A Broken Frame, of course, the second album, but the first penned by Martin Gore.  Because of it, it doesn't sound like Speak & Spell; it's a much moodier, darker album--although not nearly as dark as Depeche Mode later got.  There were, however, two tracks that were obviously meant to sound like Vince Clark; Meaning of Love and A Photograph of You.  Which are both good songs, but which don't fit the rest of the album very well.  And while moody, the mood isn't nearly as dark as it was going to be in a couple more years.

Anyway, to answer the specific questions:

1) Satellite.  Without question.  This song is so weird and I just can't stand listening to it, quite frankly.  It's not even successful in an experimental way, it's just very strange and unlikable and difficult to listen to.

2) I think I'll pick Leave In Silence.  It's maybe not quite as musically radical as Monument or Shouldn't Have Done That, but it is pretty radical for a single, and it really didn't sound like anything else on the radio at the time.  In fact, releasing it was an extremely bold move at the time, because who would have thought that the band that released Just Can't Get Enough and New Life would lead off a sophomore album.

3) The Sun and the Rainfall is the song I listen to the most.  It's truly beautiful, and I've tried to round up every bootleg variant of it that I could.  It also seems to really be a fan favorite too; one of those kind of cult classics.

4) The Sun and the Rainfall is also my favorite track.  It really is great.

5) Seven out of ten.  Very different than Speak & Spell, but of similar quality.  It's fun to see the seeds of the darker Depeche Mode already starting to pop up too.

Depeche Mode Five Questions: Speak & Spell

Vaughn George is doing a youtube series where he reviews all of the Depeche Mode albums in order, and he asks five questions in each:
1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?

Annotated, in my version, of course!  I have to discuss why!

1) This is really easy.  "What's Your Name?"  It's terrible, it's embarrassing; even they think so.  It just doesn't fit, it's too stupid.

2) I actually think Photographic, even though it's the oldest, is the one that is the most radical.  The layered little melodies, all of which are catchy, but which are just part of the tapestry of the song overall, are really quite genius, and the tone, being somewhat more serious than much of the rest of the album.  Of course, the entire album was radical in the sense of taking electronic music; which had otherwise been very artsy-fartsy up to this point, and making a bunch of pop songs out of it was pretty unusual (although Human League did the same thing with Dare right about the same time.

3) Clearly "Just Can't Get Enough."  Not necessarily on purpose, but it's just so ubiquitous.  Curiously, because for most of the time I had the American version on cassette before I had any other version, I didn't have the "normal" version of this track, though, I had what I later heard was called the Split Mix on the single.

4) That's a little bit harder of a question, but I actually think I'm going to go with the B-side Ice Machine.  It's another one that doesn't feel so... Vince Clarky, I guess.  A lot of people have called this an Erasure album with a different vocalist, and while that's not really fair, I can see the point.  A lot of the songs sound very Vince Clarky, and wouldn't have sounded at all out of place if Andy Bell had sung them and they'd appeared on Wonderland.  But sometimes, even Vince Clark doesn't sound exactly like Vince Clark; and Photograph and Ice Machine are the ones I think that qualify here.

Now, that doesn't mean that I dislike Vince Clark for picking it here; I just feel like Depeche Mode and Erasure are too divergent from each other for me to really get my mind around the fact that they were one and same back in 1980 and 81.  And I didn't really hear this until I was buying up Depeche Mode's back catalog in 1988 or so, after Music For the Masses had already come out.  This probably made this album stand out as very unusual in a way that I certainly wouldn't have thought if I'd been listening to Depeche Mode from the beginning (in fact, I might well have struggled with the new direction of Martin Gore and Alan Wilder's direction later in the decade, shocking though that sounds now).  So Vince Clark Depeche Mode songs just sound odd and out of place to me; I kind of like listening to the songs that sound like they wouldn't be so far out of place a year or two later.

5) This is hard.  It's hardly my favorite of the DM albums, and it doesn't even sound like a DM album in most cases, but because it's so different, it can't really be "ranked" with them either.  I guess out of ten, I'd give it a seven.

Likely, I'll get ahead of Vaughn.  He's only halfway through Some Great Reward right now, but of course, he gives you a lot more content on the topic than I do.  But then again, I don't know how often I'll make an update, and as we get to the more recent albums, I'll probably just peter out, because I don't even like them very much, honestly.  It's hard for me to talk about them, because I don't listen to them if I can help it most of the time.

Two ebooks read

I recently read two ebooks on my Kindle app for my phone.  This is convenient for me, because I 1) almost always have my phone with me, and 2) have pretty darn good battery life, and 3) can whip it out at odd moments when I have fifteen minutes here and there, or even an hour or two.  Although I love my actual Kindle quite a bit, I find that in general, having to synch on wifi doesn't work very well quite often, and of course, I don't carry my Kindle around in my pocket during the day all day either, so it's more convenient when I'm sitting down comfortably in the house or on the beach or wherever to read for a good half hour or more at a time.  My phone app works better for actually just whipping out a short chapter or two of a book.

Anyhoo, the two books I read are Drasmyr and Saga of Old City.  The first, by Matthew D. Ryan is a pretty cool sword & sorcery book that details a war between an ancient vampire and a wizards guild in what appears to be a fairly typical fantasy city (although the city itself isn't actually detailed all that much.)  Although there's a fairly wide cast of characters, the three obvious protagonists themselves are a bounty hunter with occasionally a bit of an attitude problem and his two "sidekicks"; a taciturn barbarian who hardly speaks and a sarcastic mostly-reformed former thief.  There is also one of the wizards who plays a nearly protagonist role, although point of view characters are over the place, and several other wizards, the vampire(s), and more all take a turn as the point of view character as the plot progresses.

Although it's not a D&D novel, in many ways it feels like a quintessential D&D novel, and the fantasy background is hard to separate from the post-D&D fantasy market in most respects.  Although it is strongly humanocentric, several additional races are mentioned obliquely.  They have unique names, but it's not hard to see through them to see that some are very similar to dwarfs, elfs, etc. of typical fantasy.  I actually quite like the humanocentric approach, though—other than the title character, who is a vampire, and his vampire-bride, every character is just a person.  This doesn't make the work feel any less fantastic; I've long ago come to the realization that just having exotic races in your fantasy for its own sake isn't nearly as cool as I thought it was when I was a teenager and the exotica was half the fun.  Non-human races need to have a place and tell something interesting about the story of the world; otherwise, why bother? (Note; this isn't necessarily true for roleplaying games, where non-human races offer some mechanical and roleplaying hook, which is the main reason for them, rather than necessarily because they serve a role in the setting.  Ideally, of course, they would do both, but that may be easier said than done. For this reason, I've deliberately made my "featured" areas of DH5, the Hill Country and Timischburg both strongly humano-centric, although all of the available races have a role to play in the setting, they also could easily be ignored and you could pretend like they don't exist, and that would work well too.)

Drasmyr is pretty well written; it's got a fairly tight and quickly moving plot, and the characters are reasonably engaging.  It's a little short, so development is deliberately light, but then again, that helps give it that sword & sorcery urgency; most stories in that vein during its real pulp heyday were short stories or novellas at best, not big fantasy novels like we have today.  There's maybe a few too many characters, but that's a very minor flaw, and most of them are sufficiently engaging that it doesn't really matter anyway, other than that you wish maybe that you'd been able to spend more time with the ones who will obviously carry on to subsequent works.

Which brings me to the next point; author Michael D. Ryan calls this a prequel, but that's a neologic false claim; it's a prelude to a supposed four book series (a prequel has to be a sequel that takes place chronologically before a previously published work; this is not a prequel because it's the first written and first published.)  It is obviously sufficiently good to encourage me to go into the next two books; but the last two books have all of the appearance of being vaporware; there hasn't been any activity in a few years on his Amazon account or his author webpage, either one, so I have no idea if the series will actually conclude or not.  Sigh.  A real shame if it doesn't, but like I said, I enjoyed this sufficiently that I'll go on.  In fact, I read this a couple of years ago and enjoyed it sufficiently that I wanted to read it again in preparation of reading the next two, which I'd had on my vaguely defined queue for some time.

I also read Saga of Old City, Gary Gygax's first novel, and the introduction (other than a brief short story which appeared in Dragon Magazine, apparently) of the character Gord the Rogue.  Although not published until 1985, and obviously attempting to build off of the relatively recent success of the Weis and Hickman Dragonlance novels, this is often seen as an old-school product in many ways, and supposedly indicative of what Gary Gygax himself thought D&D would be like.  I actually doubt that this is literally true, though—Gord is, near the end of the novel, a pretty quintessential D&D character, in a relatively quintessential D&D party, exploring a brief albeit quintessential D&D dungeon; but this doesn't really happen until the Kindle app tells me that I'm 85% or so through the novel.  Prior to that, Gord's career is described where he's clearly a solo character, going through multiple character levels of play, if that's what you can call it, without the benefit of any party or anything else that really feels like D&D the way Gygax would have played it.  This part also oddly feels more like a fix-up than a novel, as if the escapades of Gord the Rogue were unrelated stories that have been retroactively put together into a pseudo-novel format.  Either way, as I said, it feels very little like D&D as I believe Gygax, or anyone else, for that matter, would have played it, but it certainly feels like he's trying to imitate the format of some of the source material that he referenced, like Jack Vance's Dying Earth stuff, for example.

In fact, it also feels like just a jumble of all kinds of stuff Gygax liked; there's a battle fought at one point, and Gygax lovingly describes the detail of the soldiers and units and their armament and accouterments, including references to fauchard-forks and glaive-guisarmes and the specific colors of their pennons and tabards, etc; something that most reviewers can't resist mentioning and chuckling about.  But again; that doesn't feel like D&D either, even though everyone knows that Gygax really loved Medieval era war-games.

Other than that, a lot of reviewers on both Amazon and Goodreads make mention of the "mysogyny" in the book, which is absurd.  I actually thought the love story, such as it was, between Gord and Evaleigh was handled much better than I expected, and I found it the most emotionally moving portion of the book; when it was followed by the battle and the dungeoncrawl afterwards, the book actually went downhill from the so-called "mysogyny."  Of course, almost every single accusation of racism, mysogyny, or whatever is absurd and false; in fact, in general, I take the screeching of SJW reviewers as an indicator that the work is probably good in the exact dimension that they are claiming that it's bad.

However, in this case, the book is... at best, mediocre.  I hesitate to recommend it very much, but for fans of D&D specifically, who want to see where Gary Gygax's head was at at the time.  And frankly, I don't think Gygax's head had changed much from where it was ten years earlier at the dawn of the D&D era.  But Gord is not nearly as charismatic or interesting a character as, say, Conan or the Gray Mouser, or even, probably, Cugel the "Clever" although he's obviously a character made after that same mold.

Curiously, I don't know what to think of the title either.  It's not a Saga of the Old City, even if the Old City is a reference to Greyhawk City itself (probably what is meant, but that's dubious.)  Gord spends more than half of the novel wandering around the countryside, after all.  Ironically, one of the problems with the book is that some of the quick anecdotes that make the novel feel like a fix-up would be better served expanded and turned into a whole novel in their own right.  Gygax moved too quickly through plots that were novel worthy, and made them only a vignette within the novel.  Although, to be fair, he probably lacked the skill to execute them any other way other than how he did.