Books like Sea of Death

As an author, Gygax makes a pretty good game designer. By the evidence of this book, at least. It only really came together at the points of adventure, when the characters were in an interesting and dangerous place--the subsurface of the Ashen Desert or the domed City Out of Mind--and they were doing the exploring and adventuring and fighting thing. You know, like the freaking game, right?But whenever some characterization was called for, whenever someone needed to open their mouth, something stupid came out. The interplanar politics of the demons sounds like petty bickering at a PTA meeting gone weirdly awry. Gord and Leda didn't seem to know how people actually talk to one another. And the combat banter was long-winded and was essentially non-witty versions of "I kill you real good now!"As a writer, Gygax seemed to be easily distracted by details. At one point the pantaloons (or whatever) of some combatant were lovingly described and related to his ethnicity. That opponent, of course, died within a page. Later, a pole arm comes into the hands of a protagonist, and Gygax felt compelled to describe it as a fauchard-fork-bill with (specific) modifications. It's never brought up again. Still, in final judgement I can't call it bad. There was evidence that, paraphrasing Alfred Bester, Gygax was starting to run out of bad writing. After about 130 pages of indeterminable demonic bickering and Gord wandering through encounters with nomads, Gygax hits the reader with several pages of exposition about the history and ecology of the Ashen Desert. This, I felt, is where the book actually began. For some reason this worldbuilding material was not nearly as dry as it could have been (probably because Gygax could churn it out in his sleep), and it actually seemed to reset the quality of writing, or at least focus it on the plot and setting.