Quote from: GrimJesta;236302Guardians of the Flame or whatever that book series was called, did stuff like this. Bunch of earth kids zapped to a fantasy world. One was an engineering student and he remembered how to make gunpowder. It was a nice advantage until one day they got attacked by slavers... who also now had gunpowder weapons. I don't remember if the series was good or not since I read it when I was a wee lad, but I always liked how the author didn't nix their Earth knowledge. Shit, they even taught people how to make denim.

That was a good series.  Not great literature, but very fun reading for D&D players.  The engineering student you refer to was the party wizard, and he accidentally blew up his spellbook seconds after arriving on the game world and never got to use his magical abilities.  I loved that twist.

In the context of "there are many RPG novels..."

Quote from: Kellri;235700But still no Great RPG Novel.... or even a very good one.

Excuse me, sir, I believe you have not considered the greatness of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gord_the_Rogue


"If my life force were divided into thirty-nine equal parts, I would have eighteen left!"

How can you fail to recognize the greatness?



Edit:
Okay, let me be less flippant.  I think games have soaked into the culture so deeply that a lot of novels really are game novels with the serial numbers filed off.

Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, I am convinced, is merely Old World of Darkness fan fic that spiralled out of control and assumed a life of its own.  Of course, you could argue that the Dresden Files are great precisely because they eliminated the lame-ness of game fiction, thus they ceased to be game fiction.

I don't think literature, especially adventure literature, was doing well before games burst onto the scene. But after D&D, everyone who might have written a Moorcock homage was really writing a D&D homage.  Moorcock himself wrote about this in one of his books of criticism.  It might have been _Wizardry and Wild Romance_, but I forget.

The deleterious effects on quality have already been mentioned upthread with the "cliches stapled together" comment.

Speculations on how far game tropes have soaked into fiction could rapidly escalate off topic, and I don't have access to the works I would need to support my claims, so I should cease thread derailment forthwith.

Guardians of the Flame, so that's what the series was called.  I've been trying to remember what the hell the books were called for like a decade now.  I remembered reading the first book in the series (from the library) back when I was in 5th grade (circa 1988) but never did read any more of it.

For the past several years, I've always been on the lookout for the books in used book stores, but since I couldn't remember anything other than the general synopsis, it was kind of a futile effort.

Great books! I loaned mine to all my players after I borrowed it from my aunt.

One of my favorite series actually. Ranks right up there with Quag Keep and of course stories from Tanith Lee.

I liked the Guardian of the Flames series as well.  My best friend in high school was a quadriplegic.  We met a new kid who introduced us to RPGs.  It was interesting reading about the quadriplegic character.  Also, I liked how the real earth characters had to fight the personalities of their in-game characters.  The magical mishap at the beginning really set the whole FUBAR mood right away.  Also, I like how the older thief player lost the personality battle was caught stealing right away.