The isekai genre that’s more-or-less taken over the Japanese anime and light-novel markets has a long history. You could argue about the precise definition, such as whether the protagonist is required to have been a loser in real life before being transported to another world, and whether or not it’s a one-way trip, possibly involving reincarnation. And whether the other world is specifically based on RPG tropes, including concepts like “levels” and “hit points”.

You could say that Edgar Rice Burroughs invented it in 1917 with A Princess of Mars, but it was certainly a familiar genre trope before Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen in 1965, and it was only a minor novelty when Brian Daley brought modern military weapons into the mix in 1977’s The Doomfarers of Coramonde. By the time Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series kicked off in 1983, it was old hat.

But a year before Rosenberg made the idea of living in a D&D world a bit less cool, Guy Gregory’s one-and-done novel Heroes of Zara Keep hit the shelves.

Left to right, that’s Flos, Jason, Lyca, Sax, and Culter. Perfectly ordinary young adults with perfectly ordinary names. Okay, Jason has a perfectly ordinary name, but he compensates for that by being the only one who’s not obviously ordinary, having Very Unusual Hands. By the way, the tiny speck under the author’s name is the massive, threatening dragon that the Big Bad rides, or maybe a pigeon.

It’s… okay, I guess. A generic wizard summons a group of Chosen Ones at the moment of their (mostly foolish) deaths, sets them up with mentors who have exactly the right skillsets, and then when the Great Danger arrives ahead of schedule, cuts short their training and arranges a meet-up in just the right way to cause Our Heroes to fight before becoming besties. Their pretty darn quick journey to Zara Keep to defeat the Big Bad provides precisely the challenges each was trained to overcome, while also providing precisely the situations needed to trigger each one’s PTSD over the manner of their deaths. But not so much that there’s any doubt they’ll make it there in time. Honestly, it took me about a week to re-read it, because I kept nodding off.

The module book wraps everything up neatly, with no loose ends, and happy endings all around for Our Heroes. The complete lack of a sequel hook is perhaps the most novel thing about it.

Guier S. Wright III and G. Scott Wright, Jr. share the copyright on this one, and about nine years ago a Guy Wright turned up on an SFFworld forum thread to mention that his dad wrote it, he had a bunch of copies in the garage, and to feel free to email him any questions. That pretty much sums up the Internet’s collective knowledge of both book and author.

Update

I just noticed that all five of Our Heroes are looking in different directions, and none of them are looking at the titular keep or the massive, threatening dragon.

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