Retrospective: The Ice Dragon

The period between 1984 and 1985 was a strange time in the history of TSR, the Cent-Jours of Gary Gygax, who returned from his Californian "exile" to find the company he founded mismanaged and deep in debt. Gygax quickly maneuvered to retake control of TSR -- and, in so doing, unwittingly laid the groundwork for his own eventual ouster -- and attempted to get its financial house in order, in part through the publication of a large number of game products, many of which are today regarded with some ambivalence, such as Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures. I share the mixed feelings some have about this era of TSR. Even as a teenager whose only "contact" with TSR was through the pages of Dragon and Polyhedron, you could sense that the times they were a-changin' and not necessarily for the better.

Late in this period (September 1985), Pocket Books published the first of four gamebooks written by Gary Gygax and Flint Dille about the adventures of Sagard the Barbarian. When we are introduced to him, Sagard is a youth of sixteen years preparing to undertake his Ordeal of Courage, which, if successful, will mark him as an adult amongst his people. As a gamebook, The Ice Dragon really isn't that interesting in my opinion. For one, it's quite short (there are only 121 entries) and has only three different conclusions. By way of comparison, most of the Choose Your Own Adventure books had 30 or 40 different conclusions, while the Fantasy Fantasy volumes typically had 400 individual sections. Likewise, the game elements of The Ice Dragon are limited, using only a four-sided die for resolution -- an odd choice! -- and most are heavily slanted in the player's favor. It is possible to die in The Ice Dragon, but the likelihood is small. For that reason, I didn't find the book particularly compelling and never picked up any of its sequels.

The main interest that The Ice Dragon holds is that it's written by Gary Gygax and that it takes place within his World of Greyhawk setting. I can't deny that these were the primary reasons I bought the book back in the day. In the end, the book didn't feel noticeably "Gygaxian," which led me at the time to think that Flint Dille had written most of it; I still have no idea if that's true. Likewise, the Greyhawk content was limited to a few place names here and there. As I understand it, later books had even less to do with Greyhawk as we know it, since Gygax was forbidden from using certain names as a result of his departure from TSR. So, in the final analysis, there's not much to recommend in The Ice Dragon and it remains in my mind emblematic of an era when I first recognized that the bloom was finally coming off the rose planted in 1974.