Come Endless Darkness (Greyhawk: Gord the Rogue, #4) in Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy"

May 12, 2016 Derek rated it did not like it

Shelves: sword-and-sorcery, tie-in

Of the entire rambling book, the only thing that stuck with me was a description of a battle taking place on the 366th layer of the Abyss (Ojukalazogadit). The dimension itself is semi-sentient and self-hating, a vulgarity of spewing liquids and spawning self-devouring organisms and consumption and corruption and violence. A battle rages on this mad plane between two nightmare demon armies who are victims of the environment as much as they are victims of each other. It's a sequence detailed at t Of the entire rambling book, the only thing that stuck with me was a description of a battle taking place on the 366th layer of the Abyss (Ojukalazogadit). The dimension itself is semi-sentient and self-hating, a vulgarity of spewing liquids and spawning self-devouring organisms and consumption and corruption and violence. A battle rages on this mad plane between two nightmare demon armies who are victims of the environment as much as they are victims of each other. It's a sequence detailed at the tactical wargamish-level and reflects Gygax's writing in general: best when he pulls back from the personal and can manage the big picture. The big conflict is looked in terms of armies and invasions and defense of strongholds and battles raging across the planes of existence and mirrored in similar military actions in the Flanaess.

There's a distinction between 'demons', 'devils', and 'daemons' as three separate categories of interplanar evils, following very old-school Dungeons and Dragons minutia, and this reflects another part of Gygax's writing: an obsession with the fiddly mechanical parts. Everything, from the magical schema to a multiverse incorporating multiple axis of morality as part of is physical layout to a set of henchmen each lovingly detailed by name, character class, favorite equipment, and tactics (view spoiler) is part of some grand construction that only Gygax fully understands and, likely, only he bothers to care about. He has an entire color scheme to correspond to the evil emanations of various planar sources, for crying out loud.

The story itself? Sheesh. It squanders a good third of itself in preliminaries as Gygax finally admits Gord the Rogue is a super-awesome center of the universe, and then sends him and all his best friends on a raid of an enemy stronghold for the entire rest of the book. Over two hundred pages are consumed in a long running firefight and chase and confrontation and very D&Dish trap/travel/whatever situations, and it starts from a very mundane hey-lets-go-inside-this-building-full-of-bandits and escalates quickly into pocket dimensions and raging demonic battles and dweomercraefting and divine intervention.

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