Quote from: Kellri;863356I always liked his Greyhawk stuff. It was really interesting and well-written. To say that he was trying to blaspheme Gygax's creation would be ridiculous. Just a few years earlier Gygax's Gord the Rogue novels climaxed with the complete destruction of Greyhawk. Of the two holocausts in Greyhawk, Sargent did it better, IMO.

TSR certainly did much, much worse where Greyhawk was concerned. Shit like Rose Estes' GH novels and Castle Greyhawk are either deliberate attempts to take a giant dump on the setting or sarcastic boredom on par with the last few seasons of Happy Days. It's hard to tell if they were saying 'I don't give a fuck about Greyhawk' or 'Fuck Greyhawk'.

When Sargent came along, he really did turn things up to 11 with that setting. Today, if you wrote From the Ashes, people would say you were doing a WFRP grimdark Game of Thrones ripoff. He did that 25 years ago, and it stands up as a really original piece of work. I'd say it's definitive -  no one nowadays, despite all claims of being an innovative old-schooler, has the big hairy balls and writing chops necessary to take on a big popular setting and convincingly lay apocalyptic waste to it over 100,000 words.

The only serious criticism of Sargent's Greyhawk work is this: there was no index. Something that densely wonderful needs a good index.