Review: 'Quag Keep' by Andre Norton

This 1978 novel, the first ever written for a role-playing game, may still be one of the worst four decades later. The esteemed SF/F author Andre Norton was introduced to the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons by co-creator Gary Gygax. After a play session, she wrote a novel from her limited understanding of the rules about characters who don't know their lives and world are a game. That sounds intriguing but the novel isn't. It devotes less than 20 pages at the beginning and end to exploring the premise.

Instead, it's a plodding tale of an adventuring party dragged across the World of Greyhawk by a geas with bracelets holding RPG dice fixed to their wrists. The characters in the group were hard to tell apart, aside from a berserker were-boar and stoic lizard man named Gulth. The punishment he silently endured when forced to travel through a harsh, dry clime, far from swamps, was evocative and memorable. I read this in the '80s and didn't recall any of it. I'll likely forget it again.

Books · Reviews · Fantasy · 2019/09/14 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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Wow, that is where it all started. Last week I became curious about litRPG genre. So I started to read The Land: Founding. My next step was to figure out who was the first to write this kind of things. Now I want to read it. I NEED to know how it looked like 40 years ago.

#1 · Megan · 2019/10/11