Free Greyhawk Novel

Download a free Dungeons & Dragons novel set in the world of Greyhawk, the original campaign setting for the worlds greatest role playing game! Follow the links below to get your free e-book or PDF version of The Hateful Wars: The Saga of Kristryd Olinsdotter.

Download your free copy of e-book here.

I originally published this novel as a chapter-by-chapter serial at Greyhawkstories.com back in the pandemic years (2020-2021). Since then, I have revised the text, corrected a lot of errors, and collected all the chapters into one convenient downloadable file that will work on e-readers like Kindle.

The book is entirely a derivative work of fan fiction, created under the original Fan Content Policy. It’s just good D&D Greyhawk fun. No one has profited from this book in any way.

I found the tale of the Hateful Wars spread across a variety of Greyhawk sourcebooks, beginning with the original folios, further developed in Greyhawk Adventures, Dragon Magazine articles, and sources like the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer and the ensuing Living Greyhawk modules. In addition to those published sources, Greyhawk fans generated content which appeared on Canonfire and in early issues of Oerth Journal. I originally set out to collect all that scattered lore into one definitive history of this pivotal fictional conflict, but I quickly abandoned that approach in favor of weaving all the lore it all into a single epic narrative. In retrospect, that wasn’t such a great idea. A definitive history would have served the Greyhawk community better.

I had a lot of fun putting this book together. I also learned a lot along the way, such as, “This is not a good way to write a novel.” I really had no idea what I was doing. A person reads a few poorly written Dungeons & Dragons novels and thinks, “I could do a better job than that.” Turns out it’s not as easy as you might think. I set off on my first attempt at writing a novel without any plan other than trying to include every reference to the Hateful Wars that I could find, whether in the publications or non-canonical fan content. (The newly compiled version removes all the supporting documentation and citations to source material to keep the text uncluttered, but if you are as nerdy as me, you will want to know that all of that information remains intact in the original blog-post serial version.)

Now that I have a better idea of how to write a novel and all that goes into it, I probably won’t try that again. But here’s this one anyway, at least in electronic form. I once intended to do a limited pressrun to give away copies to friends and fans of Greyhawkstories, but the price proved too prohibitive. I opted instead to make the novel available as an e-book for download here at Greyhawkstories. You might as well go ahead and download a copy. It’s free, it won’t take up any space on your bookshelf, and you might even enjoy it.