Live or Die: The Choice is Yours!

The Sagard the Barbarian gamebooks are interesting artifacts from the mid-1980s. Co-authored by Gary Gygax and Flint Dille, the series consisted of four books published between 1985 and 1986 by Pocket Books in the USA and Corgi in the UK.

There are two aspects of these books that continue to intrigue me. The first is that they were released not by TSR by "mainstream" publisher(s). The '85 to '86 period coincides with Gygax's Cent-Jours, when he briefly seized control of TSR once again before his departure in October 1986. At the time, TSR was a mess on every level, so I can't help but wonder if the decision to publish these books outside of TSR is reflective of the chaos at the company. On the other hand, I also find myself wondering whether Gygax did this as an insurance policy against the demise of TSR, which was a very real possibility at the time. By publishing them elsewhere, he could safeguard his remuneration in a way he might not have been able to had TSR published them.
The other aspect of the Sagard books that's notable is that, in the first two, they're explicitly set within the World of Greyhawk. The later books, however, shift away from having any clear Greyhawk connections. This is somewhat similar to what happened to Gygax's Gord the Rogue series, whose final volumes were published after he left TSR through his new company, New Infinities. Those later volumes take place in a palimpsest version Greyhawk, with many names changed for legal reasons having to do with the terms of his departure. For this reason, I have a strange fascination with these late Gygax works, if only to ponder how they might have fit into his overall oeuvre had events not gone as they did in 1986.