Book 20 of 26 books for 2024! I should be able to reach 22, because I can read a book every 2 days, roughly…

This one caught my eye a while back while I was browsing my favorite vintage gaming store site, Wayne’s Books, and after a few moments of hesitation, I had to snap it up! The book is Hiero’s Journey (1973), by Sterling E. Lanier, and my copy is a 1983 edition.

The cover is quite accurate! It features a protagonist, Hiero, who rides what amounts to a giant moose and is friends with an intelligent bear. The book is a pure tale of adventure with incredible worldbuilding and real heart. By the time I finished, I was fully invested in Hiero’s quest and the well-being of him and his associates.

The book is also of great significance in the history of Dungeons & Dragons, though we’ll come to that in a moment…

The book is set on Earth some 5000 years after The Death, a global nuclear, chemical and biological war that annihilated most of the human population of the planet and much of the wildlife. Of those creatures that survived, many evolved dramatically, with changes involving an increase in size, a dramatic growth of intelligence, and the development of psychic powers. Most of the world is now dangerous wilderness, with isolated pockets of recovering society trading over long distances. Technology is largely lost, and often shunned due to its role in causing The Death, but a number of groups seek to learn at least some of the old ways.

Among them are the Abbeys of the Metz Republic that lie in what used to be Northwest Canada. The religious scholars of the Kandan Universal Church, a modified remnant of Catholicism, have been attempting for years to bring back an age of science and enlightenment. Their task has taken on recent urgency, however, with the rapid growth in power of the Dark Brotherhood — a group that descends from the least moral and scrupulous members of former civilization who seek scientific and technical knowledge to take over and rule the world with an iron fist. Their agents are powerful psychics and their masters have even penetrated into the inner ranks of the Abbeys to cause great harm.

Against this backdrop, Per Hiero Desteen, Secondary Priest-Exorcist, Primary Rover, and Senior Killman, is sent on a quest to the unknown south. His mission: to find an ancient relic known as a “computer” that the Kandan Church can use to coordinate their defenses against the Brotherhood and their Unclean minions. Hiero travels on his quest with Klootz, a “morse”: a semi-intelligent, psychic descendent of the moose, whose serves as both a mount and a powerful ally in combat. Almost immediately, the pair encounter Gorm, a truly intelligent and psychic bear, who warns Hiero that his travels have been detected by the Unclean and that he is in great danger. The trio narrowly escape a deadly encounter, and Gorm resolves to travel with Hiero on his journey, wherever it may take him.

What follows is a great adventure story, with Hiero, Klootz and Gorm facing off against evil servants of the Unclean, hideous monsters of the natural world, and unscrupulous groups of tribal warriors and pirates. They also pick up a couple of additional companions, must make daring escapes, and are enlisted in a battle against an unfathomable horror by a desperate race of forest creatures. And through these encounters, Hiero’s own psychic abilities become stronger and he becomes a being that the most powerful members of the Unclean are afraid of. Finally, they arrive at a lost city of the ancients — but will it hold what they are seeking?

This book was honestly pure joy to me: fun characters, strange monsters and treacherous encounters. It really feels very much like a science fiction version of a Dungeons & Dragons story, though the truth is the other way around: Hiero’s Journey is one of the cited references in the famous Appendix N of the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. This Appendix is a list of sources that inspired Gary Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons, which includes both the usual suspects like the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard and the Lord of the Rings as well as lesser known books like Hiero’s Journey.

I can really see the influence of Lanier’s book on the development of Dungeons & Dragons. It is another book about a group of adventurers with different skills and talents coming together to go on a long quest together, facing various monsters, villains and obstacles along the way. Even more, I can somewhat see the genesis of Gygax’s original method of “leveling up” characters in Dungeons & Dragons: after every psychic encounter, Lanier goes out of his way to explain how Hiero’s success has caused his abilities to grow. During a psychic battle with a sinister inhuman presence, we learn:

And an unexpected help came, unrealized in fact at this time, from the dead mind of S’nerg, whom the priest had slain. His struggle with the adept had given Hiero’s own dormant powers a new strength of which he had as yet no conception.

This increase in power from conflict feels very much exactly how original AD&D worked: kill monsters, gain experience and new abilities!

Hiero’s Journey may have had an even more direct influence on roleplaying games, however, in the development of Gamma World (1978):

The premise of Gamma World almost perfectly matches the premise of Hiero’s Journey: a nuclear holocaust has eradicated civilization, and the survivors, a mix of humans and intelligent animals, must survive a world filled with mutated horrors and regions of surviving radiation!

Lanier wrote one published sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero (1983), that I am very eager to now read. According to Wikipedia, there is also a 2024 (?) book Hiero’s Answer, but no information accompanying it. I imagine an unfinished or simply unpublished draft of Lanier’s final book was found after his passing in 2007? I will be curious to see what comes if it, if anything.

Overall, Hiero’s Journey is an imaginative and fun novel, well worth reading for anyone who enjoys fantasy-like adventure, and it is a special treat for those people who enjoy the origins of Dungeons & Dragons!