Rose Estes

[Rhuvein]

So . . I know she wrote some GH books after Gary left TSR. I don't know anything about her and have only seen a few snide comments about her around the forums.

Was her writing awful, then?

Or did people just automatically not like her because Gary had left?

The biographies on the web don't say much. She's got 3 kids and doesn't look like she's written anything since 1993.

I'm just a bit curious about her background. Was born and raised in WI? How long at TSR? Where does she live now, etc.

[geneweigel]

Her writing isn't that bad if you're reading a young teenager book. Although I would never recommend these (the two "wolf" ones or "the eyes" one) to kids because of certain weird nuances of it. It certainly has zip to do with Greyhawk and is just one of those "in-name-only" things. If you were kind of sad that DeCamp and Carter couldn't be true to Howard's Conan well then you'll cry after you've wasted your time on the Estes books!

[GT]

Yeah; her World of Greyhawk #3 book was one of the hammers to my head that alerted me that something was wrong... "Hey!! THis ain't Garyesque!! What's up?" ^__^

[Shalaban]

I probably wrote one of those snide comments about her that you read. Although to state for clarity’s sake, I should say it is her books I do not care for and not her personally.

I believe I read somewhere a long time ago that prier to doing the Greyhawk books she wrote books for children.

I read these books when they came out and still have them.

Book 3 Master Wolfe first printing and copyright March, 1987
Book 4 The Price of Power first printing and copyright August, 1987
Book 5 The Demon Hand first printing and copyright February, 1988
Book 6 The Name of The Game first printing and copyright June, 1988

An average of 5 months of time between each book and assuming she wrote them in that same time frame and had not wrote them earlier over a longer period of time, that’s not much time between books. So either she is gifted enough to write good books quickly over extended periods of time, (Unlikely.) or she hack wrote them quickly.

Book 6 is dedicated to (among others) Sharon Blume.

I was 18-19 when I read them. I am 39 now. So for 21 years I have maintained that if there are bad books to be had, these are some of the worst. I was a teenager when I read them and remember at the time thinking that they were for younger people.

You can find them in most used book stores.

I think because they are the equivalent to the Dungeons & Dragons Movie which seems to also be in every used DVD shop I have been in.

Damn.

There I go with those snide comments again.

To repent I shall force myself to re-read them again to see if today I somehow get more out of them…

Maybe…

[amalric]

I read (and still have) books 3,4 and 5, and didn't think much of them beyond the fact that they were 'set' in Greyhawk. I also can't see the name Rose Estes without thinking of the kiddie-catering Endless Quest books, which might have been mildly diverting for 10-year olds, but I'm not sure on that.

After reading SoOC and AoE, they paled by comparison, and mightily at that.

I am almost intrigued by the apparent 'non-existence' of Greyhawk Adventures Vol. 7, Dragons in Amber. But not much!

[GT]

I bought (and still have in the library...) the first Rose Estes Greyhawk book. I read it, "put it on the shelf", and never bought another.